Mark Wunderlich

Mark Wunderlich (born 1968), is an American poet. He was born in Winona, Minnesota, and grew up in a rural setting near the town of Fountain City, Wisconsin. He attended Concordia College's Institute for German Studies before transferring to the University of Wisconsin, where he studied English and German literature. After moving to New York City he attended Columbia University, where he received an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) degree.

Wunderlich has published three collections of poetry, most recently The Earth Avails (Graywolf Press, 2014). He worked on his first book, The Anchorage, (University of Massachusetts Press, 1999) as his MFA thesis at Columbia University and finished it while living in Provincetown, Massachusetts. There he was friends with the poet Stanley Kunitz (1905–2006)[2]. A second book of poems, Voluntary Servitude, was published by Graywolf Press in 2004.

Life

Wunderlich has published individual poems, essays, reviews and interviews in the Paris Review, Yale Review, Boston Review, Chicago Review, Fence and AGNI. Wunderlich has taught at Stanford, San Francisco State University, Ohio University, Barnard College, and Columbia University. Since 2004, he has been a member of the literature faculty at Bennington College in Vermont, where he is also a member of the faculty of the Graduate Writing Seminars. He lives in New York's Hudson River Valley near the town of Catskill.

Honors and awards

• Lambda Literary Award for The Anchorage (1999)
• two fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown
• Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University
• Writers at Work Award
• Jack Kerouac Prize
• Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts
• Poetry Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council
• Fellowship from the Amy Lowell Trust
• Editor's Prize from the Missouri Review, 2012
• 2015 Rilke Prize from the University of North Texas for The Earth Avails

Reviews

Poetry magazine wrote,

"Mark Wunderlich's first book, The Anchorage, is a vigorous, necessary attempt to make our words catch up with our changing world: 'This is America--beetles clustered with the harvest, dust roads trundling off at perfect angles, and signs proclaiming unbearable roadside attractions.' The poems are extravagantly -- perhaps I should say fiercely -- autobiographical."

External links

• Mark Wunderlich's homepage
• "#12 - Mark Wunderlich", December 25, 2008, Keith, First Book Interviews
• Poem: Gebet eines Ehemannes (A Husband's Prayer)

Poems in Periodicals

• "Difficult Body", poets.org
• "Once I Walked Out", thethepoetry.com
• ; reprinted in The Best American Poetry 2010, guest editor Amy Gerstler, series editor David Lehman

Criticism