Marianne Boruch

M.F.A., University of Massachusetts, 1979

Specialization

Creative Writing

Research Areas:
Poetry Writing; 20th-century poetry

Marianne Boruch (Professor, MFA, University of Massachusetts, 1979) is a poet who has taught at Purdue since 1987, developing and directing the M.F.A. Program from1987 to 2005, and the recipient of many grad/undergrad teaching awards until going rogue and emeritus in May 2018. Her work includes eleven collections of poetry—Dark Bestiary; The Anti-Grief; Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing; Cadaver, Speak; The Book of Hours (Copper Canyon Press, 2021, 2019, 2016,  2014 and 2011); Grace, Fallen from; Descendant; View from the Gazebo (Wesleyan University Press, 2008, 1993; 1985); Poems New & Selected; A Stick that Breaks and Breaks; Moss Burning (Oberlin College Press, 2004, 1997, 1995).

She's written prose as well: three books of essays on poetry, Poetry's Old Air and The Little Death of Self: Nine Essays toward Poetry (Michigan’s “Poets on Poetry” series, 1993 and 2015), and In the Blue Pharmacy: Essays on Poetry and Other Transformations (Trinity, 2005). Her memoir about a 1971 hitchhiking trip, The Glimpse Traveler, was published by Indiana University Press in 2011.

Her poems and essays have appeared in such places as The New Yorker, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Poetry London, FIELD, Iowa Review, Georgia Review, The London Review of Books, The Yale Review, APR, Poetry, Narrative, and have been anthologized in three volumes of The Best American Poetry (2015, 2009 and 1997); Poets of the New Century; Poetry 180, and elsewhere. Her awards include the 2013 Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award for The Book of Hours; her Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing, a choice as one of The New Yorker's “Most Loved Books of 2016"; four Pushcart Prizes for poetry; two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts; a Guggenheim Fellowship, The Glick Award for Indiana Writers (national division), and residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center, The American Academy in Rome, and The Anderson Center in Red Wing, MN. In 2012 she was a Fulbright Professor at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and a Fellow in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities on that campus. In 2019, she was a Senior Research Fulbright Scholar at the University of Canberra's International Poetry Studies Institute, in Australia to observe its astonishing wildlife and write a extended sequence about it. That book—Dark Bestiary—appeared in 2021 from Copper Canyon Press. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at two national parks, Isle Royale and Denali.