Mary Ruefle

I write by hand because that is how I began, and I love it. Moving the wrist, the marks the pencil or pen leave on the paper—like the trail of a snail—well, it is like drawing, no, it is drawing, and I am so enamored of this activity that sometimes I write continuously without actually forming real words, I call it 'fake handwriting', and it’s just as much fun as actually 'writing'. By fun I mean it’s just as much a mystery. This whole wrist-moving action is why I write in the first place. I don’t like tennis, or knitting, I like writing with my hands.

Mary Ruefle is a poet, essayist, professor, and artist whose work delights in the everyday through profound, curious, and humorous observations.

Since 1998, she has made ninety-nine erasure books from which she creates poetic texts through her erasure process—defined by Ruefle as an act of "creating a new text by disappearing the old text that surrounds it". Through the use of erasers, correction fluid, markers, paint, and collaged found images, she alters texts within the texts to reveal new poetic fragments and artifacts. Ruefle’s erasure books have been exhibited at the University of Arizona Poetry Center, Tucson, AZ (2024) and the Robert Frost Stone House Museum, Shaftsbury, VT (2021).

Ruefle is the author of many books of poetry, including The Book (Wave Books, 2023) and Dunce (Wave Books, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize, longlisted for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, as well as a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize; and My Private Property (Wave Books, 2016). Ruefle is also author of a book of collected lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey (Wave Books, 2012); The Most of It (Wave Books, 2008), her debut fiction collection; and a comic book, Go Home and Go to Bed! (Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics, 2007).

Ruefle is a recipient of the Academy of Arts and Letters Arthur Rense Poetry Prize (2020); the Robert Creeley Award (2014); a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Poetry (2002); an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature (1998); the Whiting Award in Poetry (1995); and a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship (1984). She was named poet laureate of Vermont in 2019.

Ruefle received her B.A. in literature from Bennington College, where she taught from 1979-1988; she returned in 2022 to serve as a Ben Belitt Distinguished Visiting Faculty member. In 2011, she served as the Bedell Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program.