Mary Ruefle

Mary Ruefle (born April 16, 1952 ) is an American poet, essayist, and professor. She has published many collections of poetry, the most recent of which, Dunce (Wave Books, 2019), was long-listed for the National Book Award in Poetry and a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize. Ruefle has also published prose, with her debut collection, The Most Of It, released in 2008. A book of her collected lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey, was released in 2012, and she published her most recent prose work, The Book, in 2023. Ruefle is known for experimenting with erasure poetry and published an erasure book, A Little White Shadow, in 2006. From 2019 to 2024, she served as the Poet Laureate of Vermont.

Ruefle's work, from poetry to essays, has been published in magazines and journals including The American Poetry Review, Harper's Magazine, The Kenyon Review, The New York Times, and The Paris Review, and in such anthologies as Best American Poetry, Great American Prose Poems (2003), American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets (2006), The Next American Essay (2002),

Personal life Ruefle was born in 1952 in McKeesport, Pennsylvania,

Ruefle has said that she began writing poems at age eight and created her first metaphor by translating an image of the ground into a map. She was writing and reading of her own volition by the time she was 10. Since her childhood involved continuous relocation, she rarely saw her extended family, but continued writing wherever she went. She has said that she dealt with the loneliness that came from constant movement by reading literature.

Because of her childhood, Ruefle does not enjoy moving around. She has lived in Bennington, Vermont, since 1971. She has said that being alone does not bother her Ruefle prefers a life with minimal technology and screens, leading her to avoid using computers. The University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program hired her as its Bedell Distinguished Visiting Professor in 2011.

Ruefle has been a guest speaker at a number of U.S. colleges, including Smith College, and the University of Arizona.

Poet Laureate of Vermont In 2019, Ruefle became the poet laureate of Vermont, succeeding Chard deNiord. She marked this honor by starting a project to mail random poems by a wide range of poets, including Etheridge Knight and former Vermont poet laureates Robert Frost and Louise Glück, to people across the state. She was aiming to mail 1,000 poems in total. She chose recipients from the phone book, and chose poems based on their relevance to current events such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the murder of George Floyd, or based on the recipients' names or street names. erasing works from the 1800s and 1900s that she buys used. She uses different mediums of erasing, including markers, pictures, In 2015, See Double Press released another of Ruefle's erasure books, An Incarnation of the Now.

Multiple poetry centers and museums have displayed Ruefle's erasure work, including the Robert Frost Stone House Museum in 2021, the St. Louis Poetry Center in 2022, and the Poets House in 2025. Obscure or unscholarly texts are her ideal erasure materials.

The Paris Review reported that Ruefle had written more than 125 erasure works as of September 2025. The tones in Ruefle's erasure work vary; they have been called "slapstick", "absurd", "lyrical", and "melancholy". A related theme is that of the process of growing old and individual and social perceptions of aging. and the idea of increasing invisibility as women age.

In an interview with Ruefle, Andrew David King of the Kenyon Review highlighted the presence of religion in Ruefle's work. She responded that she is curious about religions even though she is "not religious in the traditional sense of the word".

Form Various critics and scholars have called Ruefle's work humorous, allusive, or flawed or unusual narrators who reach out to the audience with questions or opinions.

Davis also points out Ruefle's use of tercets and how Ruefle tends to manipulate time in her poetry. and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It was long-listed for the National Book Award for poetry.

Dunce is primarily concerned with dying, reflecting on death as a fate everyone faces and how people come to terms with it. The death of Ruefle's mother is a pervasive theme in the book, The poems in Dunce also focus on poems and poets and their disruptive power over time and people, readers, and writers. Ruefle specifically discusses the idea of authority in relation to the readers, asserting that the power of interpretation is in their hands. The collection is also full of memories and thoughts on childhood. 1995 Whiting Award 1998 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters 2002 Guggenheim fellowship in poetry 2007 Lannan Foundation residency 2010 Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize 2011 William Carlos Williams Award for Selected Poems 2014 Robert Creeley Award 2017 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry 2018 MacDowell Colony Fellowship for poetry 2019 Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist in poetry for Dunce 2025 Foundation for the Contemporary Arts' Grants to Artists for poetry

Published works Full-length poetry collections Dunce (Wave Books, 2019)

Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013) Selected Poems, 2010 (William Carlos Williams Award, 2011)

Indeed I Was Pleased with the World (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2007) A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2006) Tristimania (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2004) Apparition Hill (CavanKerry Press, 2002) Among the Musk Ox People (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2002) Post Meridian (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1999) Cold Pluto (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1996; Classic Contemporary version 2001) The Adamant (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1989) Life Without Speaking (University of Alabama Press, 1987) Memling's Veil (University of Alabama Press, 1982)

Prose collections The Book (Wave Books, 2023) My Private Property (Wave Books, 2016) The Most of It (Wave Books, 2008)

Non-fiction Madness, Rack, and Honey Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012)

Essays (Online Edition Only)

Erasure An Incarnation of the Now (See Double Press, 2015)