Bruce Snider

Poet Bruce Snider (he/him) grew up in rural Indiana and attended Indiana University as an undergraduate. He earned an MFA in poetry and playwriting from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a James A. Michener Fellow. Snider’s collections, which draw on his midwestern upbringing, include The Year We Studied Women (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), winner of the 2003 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry; Paradise, Indiana (Pleiades Press, 2012), winner of the 2012 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize; and Fruit (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020), winner of the 2019 Four Lakes Prize. With the poet Shara Lessley, he is coeditor of The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice (Pleiades Press, 2018).

In Paradise, Indiana, Snider depicts the experience of growing up gay in a small town and frankly addresses absence and loss, acknowledging the ordinary details of rural life and complicated loves. James Crews, reviewing the book for The Rumpus, noted, “Snider is a master of the quiet moment, his memory-driven narratives slowly unfolding until the accumulation becomes a kind of redemption.”

Snider held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in creative writing at Stanford University and received a 2023 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. A former Jenny McKean Moore writer in residence at The George Washington University, he has taught at Stanford University, the University of San Francisco, and the University of Texas at Austin. He currently teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.