Observable Readings: Mary Ruefle & Mark Wunderlich

The reading will be streamed live to this event page and to Saint Louis Poetry Center’s Facebook page.

In conjunction with the exhibition Erasures, Saint Louis Poetry Center is thrilled to welcome acclaimed poets Mary Ruefle and Mark Wunderlich for Observable Readings.

Co-sponsored by Kranzberg Arts Foundation, High Low, and Bennington College

ABOUT THE POETS

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MARY RUEFLE is the author of many books of poetry, including Indeed I Was Pleased with the World (2007) and The Adamant (1989), which won the Iowa Poetry Prize. A Little White Shadow (2006), her book of erasures—found texts in which all but a few words have been erased from the page—reveals what Publishers Weekly called “haiku-like minifables, sideways aphorisms, and hauntingly perplexing koans.” A graduate of Bennington College, where she studied literature, Ruefle has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as a Whiting Writers’ Award and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry, Great American Prose Poems (2003), American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets (2006), and The Next American Essay (2002). Ruefle has also published a collection of fiction, The Most of It (2008). Her most recent collection Dunce (2019) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2020 Pulitzer Prize. Ruefle has taught at Vermont College and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lives in Vermont.

MARK WUNDERLICH is the author of The Anchorage (1999), which received the Lambda Literary Award, Voluntary Servitude (2004), The Earth Avails (2014), which was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award and received the 2015 Rilke Prize, and God of Nothingness (2021).  He has received fellowships from the NEA, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Wallace Stegner Fellowship Program at Stanford, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Amy Lowell Trust and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation.  Wunderlich has taught at Stanford and Barnard College and in the graduate writing programs at Columbia University, Ohio University, San Francisco State University and Sarah Lawrence.  As an arts administrator, he has worked at the Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, the University of Arizona Poetry Center, Poets & Writers and the Napa Valley Writers Conference.  He holds a BA in German Literature and English from the University of Wisconsin, and an MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts. Wunderlich lives in the Hudson River Valley and has taught at Bennington since 2004. He became the director of the Bennington Writing Seminars in August 2017.