Mary Ruefle was born in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, in 1952. She spent her first twenty years traveling around the United States and Europe with her mother and her father, a military officer. Ruefle earned a degree in literature from Bennington College in 1974. Upon graduation, she attended the writing program at Hollins College. She has been quoted as claiming that she began writing poems as soon as she could read.

Ruefle’s work has appeared in numerous magazines and journals, and as of 2007, she was the author of seven books of poetry, including Post Meridian (2000), which includes “Sentimental Education,” all of which have been well-received. Her poems have been anthologized in Best American Poetry, The Extraordinary Tide, and Great American Prose Poems and her collection The Adamant won the 1988 Iowa Poetry Prize. She also won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim...