Blair Hobbs was born and is now based 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 work 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. She’s also completed a collage series that reflected her menopausal body’s rollercoaster and the death of her art-professor mother. Her 2023 show, “Radiant Matter,” was a series documenting and coping with her breast cancer diagnosis and successful treatments. Her 2025 show, “Birthday Cake for Flannery,” is a revisiting of the writings, complicated characters and life of Flannery O’Connor. Blair’s artworks are often mixed media collages on cotton canvases. Her 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 including The Oxford American’s 2020 “Place” issue. “Birthday Cake for Flannery,” was reviewed in The Paris Review by novelist Jamie Quatro. Her work has been shown and collected across the Southeast. Now retired, she was a Senior Lecturer of Creative Writing at the University of Mississippi for 28 years.