Writers-in-Residence

Each year the Kristina Stahl Writer-in-Residence brings a nationally recognized poet or prose writer to Colby to visit classes, lecture on craft, give a reading, and meet with creative writing students. Past writers-in-residence include Tony Hoagland, Margot Livesey, Maurice Manning, Steve Orlen, Bill Roorbach, Dani Shapiro, Jo Ann Beard, Edward Hirsch, Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, and Marilyn Chin.

Mary Ruefle
Mary Ruefle has published over a dozen books of poetry, including Dunce (2019), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, My Private Property (2016), Indeed I Was Pleased with the World (2007), and The Adamant (1989), which won the Iowa Poetry Prize. She is also the author of the essay collection Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) and the work of fiction The Most of It (2008). A Little White Shadow (2006)  is her book of wildly celebrated erasures. Ruefle has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is the Poet Laureate of Vermont.

The Jennifer Jahrling Forese Writer in Residence is possible thanks to a generous endowment funded by the Forese family, for which we in Creative Writing and the English Department are very grateful. The program provides opportunities for students, faculty, and members of the community to benefit from sustained engagement with the visiting writers over the course of a semester, including but not limited to public readings or presentations, community events, and writing workshops and meetings.

Marianne Boruch
Marianne Boruch’s eleven books of poetry include Bestiary Dark (Copper Canyon, 2021) triggered by her 2019 Fulbright in Australia observing its astonishing wildlife. Her prose: three essay collections, recently The Little Death of Self (Michigan’s “Poets on Poetry” Series), and a memoir, The Glimpse Traveler (Indiana, 2011). Among her honors: the Kingsley-Tufts Award for The Book of Hours, a Guggenheim, two NEAs, and residencies at the Rockefeller Bellagio Center, two national parks (Denali and Isle Royale) and a previous Fulbright at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Her work appears in APR, Poetry, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. After 33 years teaching at Purdue, Boruch retired and was named an emeritus professor in 2018. Since 1988, she has been on faculty at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.