Marianne Boruch

Poet and essayist Marianne Boruch grew up in Chicago. She is the author of collections including Bestiary Dark (2021), The Anti-Grief (2019), Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing (2016), Cadaver, Speak (2014), The Book of Hours (2011) from Copper Canyon Press, Grace, Fallen from (Wesleyan University Press, 2008), and Poems: New & Selected (Oberlin College Press, 2004). Her memoir, The Glimpse Traveler (Indiana University Press, 2011), concerns a hitchhiking trip she took in 1971. She is the author of prose collections on poetry, including The Little Death of Self (University of Michigan Press, 2017), In the Blue Pharmacy (Trinity University Press, 2005), and Poetry’s Old Air (University of Michigan Press, 1995). Boruch’s lyric poems often shake an ordinary moment from its shell, separating strands of thought and habit with a gaze at once wry and unblinking.

Boruch’s honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, residencies from the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center, Pushcart prizes, the 2011 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for The Book of Hours, a 2012 Fulbright Visiting Professorship at the University of Edinburgh, and a 2019 Fulbright Senior Scholarship at the International Poetry Studies Institute at the University of Canberra. She has been a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome and at two national parks: Isle Royale and Denali.

Boruch earned an MFA at the University of Massachusetts. She has taught at Tunghai University in Taiwan, at the University of Maine at Farmington, and in the MFA program in creative writing at Purdue University, which she founded. Since 1988, she has also taught in the low-residency graduate program for writers at Warren Wilson College. She has been a faculty member at Bread Loaf, RopeWalk, and the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. Boruch was awarded the 2022 Jennifer Jahrling Foresee writer-in-residence position at Colby College.