Blaise Allen, Ph.D., Director of Community Outreach
Blaise is an award-winning poet and photojournalist. Her poems have been widely published in anthologies and magazines including: Wingbeats: Exercises & Practice in Poetry, Dos Gatos Press, The Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Blue Fifth Review, Walt Whitman Review, Long Island Quarterly, and University of Missouri Kansas City School of Medicine’s Journal, Touch. Blaise is committed to the preservation of voice, culture, and language arts education and is particularly interested in community outreach to underserved youth and elder populations. She founded and hosts the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project, The High School Performance Poetry Project, Bards of a Feather at Green Cay Wetland Preserves, Year-round community outreach workshops at Old School Square, and The Annual 100K Poets for Change event, and the Annual Haiku Seminar at the Morikami Museum and Gardens.

The Festival is grateful to Blaise for her many photographic contributions to the festival. Many of the images you see in festival materials in print and digitally are a result of some beautiful work she has done to visually chronicle and capture the spirit of the festival.