Marianne Boruch

Marianne Boruch (born June 19, 1950) is an American poet whose published work also includes essays on poetry, sometimes in relation to other fields (music, visual art, ornithology, medicine, aviation, etc) 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 (Red Wing, MN), 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.^[1] 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.

Books

Boruch is the author of several poetry collections, including:

• The Book of Hours (Copper Canyon Press, 2011)
• Grace, Fallen from (Wesleyan University Press, 2008; paperback edition, 2010)
• Ghost and Oar (chapbook: Red Dragonfly Press, 2007)
• Poems: New & Selected (Oberlin College Press, 2004)
• A Stick That Breaks and Breaks (Oberlin College Press, 1997)
• Moss Burning (Oberlin College Press, 1993)
• Descendant (Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1989)
• View from the Gazebo (Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1985)

She is also the author of two books of essays:

• In the Blue Pharmacy (Trinity University Press, 2005)
• Poetry's Old Air (Poets on Poetry Series, Univ. of Michigan Press, 1995)

She has also written a memoir:

• The Glimpse Traveler (Indiana University Press, 2011)^[2]

Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, The Georgia Review, The Paris Review, The London Review of Books, The Massachusetts Review, The Hudson Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Poetry London, FIELD, Poetry 180, Poets of the New Century, Poets Reading: The FIELD Symposia, Hammer and Blaze: A Gathering of Poets, American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere.

Awards

• Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, The Book of Hours, 2013.
• Fulbright/Visiting Professorship, University of Edinburgh, 2012.
• Fellowship, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, 2012.
• Gold award for Best Feature, "Cadaver, Speak" in The Georgia Review, The Southeast's GAMMA Awards, 2011.
• Poems chosen for Best American Poetry, 2009 and 1997.
• Residency/Fellowship, The Bellagio Center, the Rockefeller Foundation, 2009.
• Visiting Artist Residency, The American Academy in Rome, 2009.
• Faculty Fellowship in a Second Discipline, Purdue University, 2008.
• The Strousse Award, for poems in Prairie Schooner, 2008.
• Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, 2005-2006.
• Artist-in-Residence, Isle Royale National Park, 2006.
• Pushcart Prizes, 2012, 2001 and 1988.
• Poetry Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, 1999 and 1984.
• Terrence DePres Award from Parnassus, 1994.

References