Mary Ruefle

Who is Mary Ruefle?

Mary Ruefle is an American poet, essayist, and professor. She has published eleven collections of poetry, most recently, Selected Poems. 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, American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets, and The Next American Essay.

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 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.