Blair Lee | Lunn
Blair is a queer, Japanese American writer and educator half from the American South and half from the Midwest. She is the author of Emergence (Bottlecap Press). Her fiction and nonfiction have been selected as prizewinners by Rebecca Makkai and Justin Torres and have appeared in American Short Fiction, The Masters Review Anthology, Moon City Review, and Bath Flash Fiction, among other places. Her scripts have won first place in Scriptapalooza’s Television Writing Competition, have placed as finalist in ScreenCraft’s Short Film Screenplay Contest, and have progressed in Austin Film Festival’s short screenplay competition. They have also spent time on The Black List’s 2021 Top List and the Red List’s top one percent. Her story collection, essays, and other work have received finalist positions for numerous awards, including the PANK book contest, the Robert and Adele Schiff Award, the VanderMey Nonfiction Prize, the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, and multiple honorable mentions from Glimmer Train.
Blair teaches creative writing, literature, composition, and communication courses. She received her MA from the University of Toledo, her MFA from NC State, and is currently working on her PhD at UNC Greensboro. She has a broader interest in studies within the humanities, including concepts of community, climate, and care, as well as interests in cross-disciplinary, community-engaged, and public-facing work. Her areas of focus include the craft of writing, speculative fiction, ethnic American literature, transnational literature, studies in adaptation, homesteading and borderland studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, queer, crip, feminist, and cultural rhetorics, and the ethics of storytelling. Her dissertation, Indulge/Diverge: Pleasure and Power in Women of Color Genre Fiction, critiques the over-critique of Women of Color Writers and examines the uses of indulgence within “generic” fiction conventions as forms of resistance, reclamation, and empowerment.