The 2014 Poetry Arts Series poet is Mary Ruefle. She will be speaking November 6, 2014, at 1:30 in TEC-128.

In 1952, Mary Ruefle was born outside of Pittsburgh to a father who served as a military officer. She spent her early life traveling throughout the U.S. and Europe. She graduated from Bennington College in 1974 with a degree in literature.

Mary Ruefle has published many books of poetry, including Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013); Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010); A Little White Shadow (2006), an art book of “erasures,” a variation on found poetry; Tristimania (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 2003), Among the Musk Ox People (2002); Apparition Hill (2001); Cold Pluto (2001); Post Meridian (2000); Cold Pluto (1996); The Adamant (1989), winner of the 1988 Iowa Poetry Prize; Life Without Speaking (1987); and Memling’s Veil (1982).

She is also the author of a book of prose, The Most of It (2008), and a comic book, Go Home and Go To Bed (Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics, 2007).

About Ruefle’s poems, 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.”

Mary is the recipient of numerous honors, including an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont, and teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College.Biography from Poets.org

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