A Brief Biography
Dr. Len Blanchard has been teaching at State College of Florida since the fall
semester of 1999. While the bulk of his teaching assignments has consisted of
Written Communication I and II classes, he has taught preparatory English, worked in
MCC’s writing and reading labs, and taught several different literature courses,
including American Literature I and II, World Literature II, The Short Story,
Contemporary Literature and Introduction to Poetry.
As a faculty member of Pierian Spring Academy, a private institution in Sarasota
dedicated to continuing adult education, he has led seminars devoted to the fiction
and poetry of notable Southern writers of the mid- to late-twentieth century. He has
also led seminars on major work by Albert Camus, on the drama of Tennessee
Williams, and on European drama in the twentieth century, including plays by Luigi
Pirandello, Federico Garcia Lorca, Bertolt Brecht and Albert Camus. He has also led
seminars in the Victorian novel, including William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel
Vanity Fair, and four of Thomas Hardy’s masterpieces, including Tess of the
d’Urbervilles. This past winter season he led a seminar entitled “The Haunting Past”
in a discussion of major novels by Yasunari Kawabata and Louise Erdrich.
Upon graduating from Plainville High School in Connecticut in 1965, Len headed
south to Lexington, in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. In 1969, he earned a B.A.
degree cum laude with Honors in English from Washington and Lee University.
After two years spent teaching English at Oak Ridge Military Institute, a few miles
north of Greensboro, North Carolina, he entered the doctoral program in English at
Emory University in Atlanta as an NDEA Fellow. He earned an M.A. degree from
Emory in 1974, and a year later, after completing a doctoral dissertation on the poetry
and later novels of Thomas Hardy, he was awarded the Ph.D.
While completing his doctoral dissertation, Len taught English at St. Mark’s School
of Texas in Dallas. From 1975 – 1979, he taught composition and American
literature at El Centro College, the downtown campus of the Dallas County
Community College District. Len has extensive experience in business and
management, however, as well as in education. He was employed by the Southland
Corporation, headquartered in Dallas, from 1976 to 1987. During most of this period,
he worked as a developer of training and management development programs for
Southland’s corporate training center. After leaving Southland, Len worked briefly
as a writer and developer with a boutique merchant banking firm in Little Rock,
Arkansas. This experience and his extensive background in instructional technology
served him well as an independent consultant writing business plans and developing
training programs for a wide variety of clients and employers around the nation.
From 1989 – 1990, Len served as Vice-President of Human Resources with Harken
International, a start-up subsidiary of Harken Energy Corporation. In Key West in
1991, he was co-founder and director of Caribbean Institute, a firm dedicated to
developing and presenting training in various software programs.
Having contracted with a client based in Sanibel, Florida, Len relocated from Dallas
to Florida in 1990. After two years in Key West where he began writing poetry
seriously, he settled in Sarasota in 1992. Len’s body of work now consisits of more
than 1300 poems, more than 230 of which have been published in more than 60
different literary magazines and journals nationwide. His poetry has been nominated
for a Pushcart Prize on three occasions: in 1996, 1998, and 2004. Through
AuthorHouse, Len published in 2001 An American Passion, an epic poem on the life
and killing of Crazy Horse, the illustrious mystic warrior of the Oglala Lakota Sioux.
His first collection of poetry, Provocations of the Birds and the Beach, was
published in 2005 by Bellowing Ark Press of Seattle. Len’s play, a metaphysical
drama in seven acts entitled The First Day: Albert Camus Meets Crazy Horse in the
Kingdom, was published through AuthorHouse in 2012. A second collection of
poetry, People Matter: Sarasota Portraits & Others was also published in 2012
through AuthorHouse. In the summer of 2013, Len published with AuthorHouse a
second play, Not Most People: The Pornographist’s Tale, and a third collection of
poetry, Beach Synchronization.
As “Leonard A. Blanchard,” Len is listed in Marquis’ Who’s Who in America ,
Who’s Who in the World and Who’s Who in Finance and Business, as well as in the
2005 and 2006 editions of Who’s Who among America’s Teachers.