Marianne Boruch


Marianne Boruch is an American poet whose published work also includes essays on poetry, sometimes in relation to other fields and a memoir about a hitchhiking trip taken in 1971.

Life

Born and raised Catholic in Chicago, Boruch was educated in parish schools and spent many summers in Tuscola, Illinois with her grandparents. She graduated from the University of Illinois, then earned her MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst where her MFA thesis advisor was James Tate. 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 as a professor emeritus.
Since 1988, she has also taught semi-regularly in the low-residency MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. 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, Bear River, and RopeWalk.
Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, 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,"The New York Review of Books", "The Nation", "Narrative", 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.
She lives with her husband in West Lafayette, Indiana.

Collections

Poetry

View from the Gazebo Descendant Moss Burning A Stick That Breaks and Breaks Poems: New & Selected Ghost and Oar Grace, Fallen from The Book of Hours Cadaver, Speak Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing The Anti-Grief
  • ''Bestiary Dark''

Essays

Poetry's Old Air In the Blue Pharmacy The Little Death of Self: Nine Essays toward Poetry
  • ''Sing by the Burying Ground: essays''

Memoirs

The Glimpse Traveler
  • ''The Figure Going Imaginary--Poetry/ Life Drawing/ The Cadaver Lab--A Year in Pieces''

Awards

Her poetry collection, The Book of Hours published in 2013 by Copper Canyon Press, won the 2013 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her most recent collection, Bestiary Dark, was published in 2021 by Copper Canyon Press.
Her awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, The Anderson Center, Hall Farm, Djerassi, and the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center.