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Mary Ruefle (born 1952) is an American poet, essayist, and professor. She has published eleven collections of poetry, most recently, Indeed I Was Pleased with the World (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2007). Her debut collection of prose, The Most Of It was published by Wave Books in 2008.

She has been widely published in magazines and journals including The American Poetry Review, Verse Daily, The Believer, Harper's Magazine, and The Kenyon Review, and in anthologies including Best American Poetry, Great American Prose Poems (2003), American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets (2006), and The Next American Essay (2002).

She has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Whiting Writer's Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Lannan Foundation residency, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her poems are featured in American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets (2006) and many other anthologies.

In describing her poetry, the poet Tony Hoagland has said, "Her work combines the spiritual desperation of Dickinson with the rhetorical virtuosity of Wallace Stevens. The result (for those with ears to hear) is a poetry at once ornate and intense; linguistically marvelous, yes, but also as visceral as anything you are likely to encounter."

The daughter of a military officer, Ruefle was born outside Pittsburgh in 1952, but spent her early life traveling around the U.S. and Europe. She graduated from Bennington College in 1974 with a degree in Literature. She currently lives in Vermont and teaches in the MFA in Writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts and is a visiting professor at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

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