Marianne Boruch

Born on June 19, 1950, in Chicago, Marianne Boruch earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois and her MFA from the University of Massachusetts where she studied with James Tate.

Boruch is the author of a dozen poetry collections, including The Figure Going Imaginary (Copper Canyon Press, 2024); Bestiary Dark (Copper Canyon Press, 2021); The Anti-Grief (Copper Canyon Press, 2019); Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing (Copper Canyon Press, 2016); and Cadaver, Speak (Copper Canyon Press, 2014). The Book of Hours, her first collection published by Copper Canyon Press in 2011, won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Boruch also published Grace, Fallen (Wesleyan University Press, 2010) and Poems: New and Selected (Oberlin College Press, 2004), which collected poems from four previous volumes, two published by Oberlin College Press and two by Wesleyan University Press.

Exploring the essential in the mundane, Boruch’s poems are known for their precision, calm attention, and careful reserve. Poet David Young writes that Boruch isn’t “flamboyant or flashy, armored in theory or swimming with a school. Her poems eschew the need for stylistic eccentricity or surface mannerisms. They are contained, steady, and exceptionally precise. They build toward blazing insights with the utmost honesty and care.”

An essayist as well as a poet, Boruch has also published the critical works 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), as well as a memoir The Glimpse Traveler (Indiana University Press, 2011). 

Boruch’s awards include fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has had residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, two national parks (Denali and Isle Royale), and elsewhere.

Boruch has taught at Tunghai University in Taiwan and the University of Maine at Farmington. In 1987, she developed the creative writing MFA program at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, serving as its first director until 2005, earning emeritus status in 2018. Since 1988, she has also taught in the low-residency MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina.