Bruce Snider

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 Fruit (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020), winner of the 2019 Four Lakes Poetry Prize; Paradise, Indiana (Pleiades Press, 2012), winner of the 2012 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize; and The Year We Studied Women (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), winner of the 2003 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. With the poet Shara Lessley, he is coeditor of The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice (Pleiades Press, 2018).

His poems and essays have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Copper Nickel, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Poetry, and TheThreepenny Review, among other publications. 

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 has participated in residencies at Yaddo, the Millay Colony, the Amy Clampitt Residency Program, the James Merrill House, VCCA, and the Bogliasco Foundation. 

He lives in Baltimore, Maryland, and teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.