Bianca Stone Poet Laureate Project: A Reading and Conversation with Mary Ruefle

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Join us for a reading and conversation with Vermont State Poet Laureate Bianca Stone and former Vermont State Poet Laureate Mary Ruefle '74 as part of Stone’s Poet Laureate Project, which highlights the poetry of Vermont’s former poet laureates. 

The series focuses on the work of each poet and underscores how poems and poets are vital to our state, connecting community members to the changing landscape, architecture, wildlife, and to each other on the most intimate level.

Mary Ruefle '74 served as Vermont’s poet laureate from 2019 to 2024 and is a graduate of Bennington College and a former faculty member. She is the author of many books, including The Book and Dunce, a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize, and longlisted for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, as well as a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. Her book Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Selected Poems was the winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Mary is also an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries (including the Frost House in 2021). Ruefle is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Robert Creeley Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. 

Bianca Stone is a Vermont-based poet and scholar currently serving as Vermont’s poet laureate. Stone is the author of many books, including the poetry collections What is Otherwise Infinite, which received the 2022 Vermont Book Award, and The Near and Distant World (Tin House, January 2026). Her poetry and writings have appeared widely in such magazines as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poets and Writers, and The Nation. In 2013, she co-founded the poetry-based nonprofit, Ruth Stone House, where she organizes events and retreats, teaches classes on poetry and poetic study, hosts the Ode & Psyche Podcast.