Discipline: Literature – poetry

Marianne Boruch

Discipline: Literature – poetry
Region: West Lafayette, IN
MacDowell Fellowships: 2005, 2007, 2016, 2018, 2020, 2025

Marianne Boruch has written 11 books of poems, most recently Bestiary Dark (Copper Canyon Press, 2021) about the astonishing wildlife in Australia in the age of fires and climate change; four essay collections, including Sing by The Burying Ground (Northwestern University Press, 2024); two memoirs, The Glimpse Traveler (Indiana, 2011) about a hitchhiking trip in 1972, and The Figure Going Imaginary (Copper Canyon, 2025), which includes her journal notes from Purdue’s “Faculty Fellowship in the Study of a Second Discipline” where she was given a semester in the school’s human anatomy course (the cadaver lab) and a life drawing class which fueled her 8th poetry collection, Cadaver, Speak.

Among her awards are the Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award for The Book of Hours, the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Writers Award (national division), and various teaching and research and writing honors from Purdue. She has received residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, The American Academy in Rome, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy, MacDowell, Yaddo, Denali and Isle Royale national parks, Fulbright scholarships in Edinburgh and Canberra, and a residency in Budapest at the Institute for Advanced Study, Central European University. Her work appears in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, APR, The London Review of Books, Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, Georgia Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere.

During her MacDowell residencies, Boruch has worked on Grace, Fallen, The Glimpse Traveler, The Anti-Grief, Bestiary Dark, and written and revised numerous poems and essays. At MacDowell in 2025, Boruch wrote and revised poems that will be included in her 12th poetry collection, tentatively titled In the Winter Ruins. She also completed a novel-in-stories and submitted it for publication and worked on pen-and-ink watercolor drawings.

Studios

Monday Music

Marianne Boruch worked in the Monday Music studio.

Given to the residency by the Monday Music Club of Orange, NJ, Monday Music Studio is sited next to an enormous boulder deposited by glaciers thousands of years ago. A small dormer once pierced the east slope of the roof, but after damage suffered in the 1938 hurricane, the roof was rebuilt without the dormer. The interior…

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