Marianne Boruch

Who is Marianne Boruch?

Marianne Boruch is an American poet whose published work also includes essays on poetry, sometimes in relation to other fields and, most recently, a memoir about a hitchhiking trip taken in 1971. Her awards for that work—to aid and abet it—have been fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and residencies at MacDowell, The Anderson Center, Hall Farm, and the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center. She's been a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome, and at Isle Royale, America's most isolated national park. For winter and spring, 2012, she was awarded a Fulbright/Visiting Professorship at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, as well as a fellowship in that University's Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities.

Born in Chicago, Boruch graduated from the University of Illinois and earned her MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has taught at Tunghai University in Taiwan, and at the University of Maine at Farmington, going on, in 1987, to develop and direct the MFA program in creative writing at Purdue University where she continues to be on faculty. Since 1988, she has also taught semi-regularly in the low-residency graduate Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. On occasion, she's run workshops and given lectures and readings at summer writers' conferences, among them Bread Loaf, the Haystack School of the Arts, and RopeWalk. She lives with her husband in West Lafayette, Indiana.