Mary Ruefle

Mary Ruefle (born April 16, 1952) is an American poet, essayist, and professor. She has published many collections of poetry, the most recent of which, Dunce (Wave Books, 2019), was long-listed for the National Book Award in Poetry and a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize. Ruefle has also published prose, with her debut collection, The Most Of It, released in 2008. A book of her collected lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey, was released in 2012, and she published her most recent prose work, The Book, in 2023. Ruefle is known for experimenting with erasure poetry and published an erasure book, A Little White Shadow, in 2006. From 2019 to 2024, she served as the Poet Laureate of Vermont.

Ruefle's work, from poetry to essays, has been published in magazines and journals including The American Poetry Review, Harper's Magazine, The Kenyon Review, The New York Times, and The Paris Review, and in such anthologies as Best American Poetry, Great American Prose Poems (2003), American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets (2006), The Next American Essay (2002), and Poetry Magazine.