Mary Ruefle

Mary Ruefle (born 1952) is an American poet, essayist, and professor. She has published eleven collections of poetry, most recently, Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010). Ruefle's debut collection of prose, The Most Of It, appeared in 2008 and her collected lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey, was published in August 2012 - both from Wave Books.

She has been widely published in magazines and journals including The American Poetry Review, Verse Daily, The Believer, Harper's Magazine, and The Kenyon Review, and in anthologies including Best American Poetry, Great American Prose Poems (2003), American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets (2006), and The Next American Essay (2002).

She has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Whiting Writer's Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Frost Place residency, a Lannan Foundation residency, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her poems are featured in American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets (2006) and many other anthologies. In 2011, her Selected Poems was awarded the William Carlos Williams Award by The Poetry Society of America.

In describing her poetry, the poet Tony Hoagland has said, "Her work combines the spiritual desperation of Dickinson with the rhetorical virtuosity of Wallace Stevens. The result (for those with ears to hear) is a poetry at once ornate and intense; linguistically marvelous, yes, but also as visceral as anything you are likely to encounter."

The daughter of a military officer, Ruefle was born outside Pittsburgh in 1952, but spent her early life traveling around the U.S. and Europe. She graduated from Bennington College in 1974 with a degree in Literature. She currently lives in Vermont and teaches in the MFA in Writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts and is a visiting professor at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.