photo: Michelle Eikenbary

Mary Ruefle is the author of several volumes of poetry, most recently A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 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).

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."

She is the recipient of both National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim fellowships as well as both an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature and a Whiting Foundation Writer's Award. She lives in Vermont, where she is a professor at Vermont College's MFA program.