The Indiana University Southeast Library is hosting a public reception and reading by renowned Indiana poet, Marianne Boruch on Wednesday, November 13th from 6:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. in the library’s third-floor reading gallery. The event is free and open to the community.
Marianne Boruch has written eleven 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, forthcoming March 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 IU/Purdue Medical School’s gross human anatomy course (a.k.a. the cadaver lab), and also a Life Drawing class in Art & Design on campus which fueled her 8th poetry collection, Cadaver, Speak. She is currently working on her 12th book of poems, tentatively titled “In the Winter Ruins.”
Among her awards are the Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award for The Book of Hours, Indiana’s Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Writers Award (national division), and various teaching and research/writing honors from Purdue. In addition, there are fellowships/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, national parks (Denali and Isle Royale), Fulbright scholarships (Edinburgh and Canberra) and most recently an artist residency/Fellowship in Budapest at the Institute for Advanced Study, Central European University (Jan/Feb 2024) where she researched the ancient Roman ruins under that city (only a fourth of which has been excavated) to write poems about that mind-shattering experience. Her work appears in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, APR, The London Review of Books, Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, the Georgia Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere.
Boruch earned emeritus status in 2018 after teaching at Purdue for 31 years. She lives with her husband in West Lafayette where they raised their son.