Bianca Stone

Bianca Stone was born in Burlington, Vermont, on November 15, 1983. She earned a BA at Antioch College in 2006 and a MFA from New York University in 2009.

Stone is the author of four full-length poetry collections: The Near and Distant World (Tin House, 2026); What Is Otherwise Infinite (Tin House, 2022), which was the winner of the 2022 Vermont Book Award; The Möbius Strip Club of Grief (Tin House, 2018); and Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Octopus Books and Tin House, 2014). Her hybrid poetry-art books include Poetry Comics from the Book of Hours (Pleiades Press, 2016) and a chapbook series from Factory Hollow Press.

About her poetry, the poet Edward Hirsch has said, 

Bianca Stone is a seeker. Wry, funny, and often thwarted, mired in daily life, metaphysically tormented, afflicted by what she calls “allergies of the soul,” she searches for something deep and meaningful, something ongoing, mysterious, and ineffable. She has the impulse to kneel and be “thunderstruck with language,” to find “the new Eucharist,” to call out to a God who is also searching for God. [Her poetry] is a rare thing in contemporary American poetry—a spiritual testament.

Stone’s collaborative work includes a project with the essayist and poet Anne Carson on Antigonick (New Directions, 2012), the illuminated version of Carson’s translation of Sophocles’s Antigone, and A Little Called Pauline (Penny Candy Books, 2020), a children’s book based on a Gertrude Stein poem. Stone has created an experimental animation for The Vast Library of the Female Mind, the documentary on her grandmother, the poet and former poet laureate of Vermont, Ruth Stone, directed by Nora Jacobson. She is currently working on a poetry film project with the filmmaker, Joel Gardner. 

Stone has lectured at many universities as a visiting professor and lecturer in poetry, including Dartmouth College, Vermont College of Fine Arts, and MFA programs at Bennington College and University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 2013, she cofounded, with the poet Ben Pease, Ruth Stone House, where she is now organizing a school of poetic study with classes, events, and lectures, both virtually and at the Ruth Stone House in Goshen, Vermont, which is listed on the national register of historic places. She is host of Ruth Stone House’s Ode & Psyche, a podcast exploring poetry and its relations to philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the language of poetry and consciousness. She is currently serving as poet laureate of Vermont through 2028, where she lives.