Mary Ruefle

Mary Ruefle (born 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 longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry and was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize.

Ruefle's debut collection of prose, The Most Of It, appeared in 2008, and her collected lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey, were published in August 2012, both published by Wave Books. She has also published a book of erasures, A Little White Shadow (2006).

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 such anthologies as Best American Poetry, Great American Prose Poems (2003), American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets (2006), and The Next American Essay (2002).

The daughter of a military officer, Ruefle, was born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania in 1952 but spent her early years traveling around the U.S. and Europe. She graduated from Bennington College in 1974 with a degree in Literature. She currently teaches at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. In 2011, she served as the prestigious Bedell Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program. In 2019, she was named poet laureate of the state of Vermont.