Blair Hobbs is a Senior Lecturer of Creative Writing at the University of Mississippi. In 1964, she was born in Oxford, Mississippi and grew up in Auburn, Alabama. Visual art was always a necessary form of communication, and her interest in storytelling led her to graduate with a BA in English literature from Auburn University. From there, she earned an MA in Creative Writing from Hollins University and an MFA in Creative Writing, with an emphasis in poetry, at the University of Michigan. Blair’s collages are linked to language and often include bits of hand-written texts. Typically, her bodies of work are narrative-driven and range from the mundane to the sublime. She finds inspiration in travel, home life, nature, and literature. She’s produced gallery exhibits documenting trips to Italy, Mexico, and Great Britain. She’s shown “Hot Messes in Southern Literature,” where she assembled visual character evolution in the works of William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Flannery O’Connor. As a word nerd, she enjoys playing with visual puns or accompanying dialogue with her drawn characters. At present, many of her collages reflect her menopausal body’s rollercoaster and the recent death of her art-professor mother. Blair’s most latest show, titled “Ground,” was a contemplation of the word as a noun and as a verb--as in the pandemic made her grateful for standing on ground, glad for not being in the ground, and sad to feel grounded (as in sent to “time out”). She also made collages of odd animal behaviors that result from this ongoing isolation (lonely Japanese eels, cheered up by human voicemails and unsupervised elephants, drunk and passed out in a tea garden). Her collages are mixed media on cotton canvases. Blair’s materials include pencils, acrylic paint, pens, ink, linoleum prints, handmade mulberry papers from Thailand and Japan, foil candy wrappers, gold leaf, duct (Duck) tape, oil pastels, sequins, embroidery thread, doilies, flea-market fabric, micro glitter, pressed flowers, feathers, and shattered Christmas tree balls. A variety of journals and magazines have published Blair’s poetry, most recently in The Oxford American’s 2020 “Place” issue. Her visual art has shown across the Southeast, most recently at Southside Gallery in Oxford, Mississippi and Fischer Gallery in Jackson, Mississippi.