SCOTT RUESCHER
ABOUT
Scott Ruescher is the author of one full-length poetry collection Waiting for the Light to Change (Prolific Press, 2017); of a second one, Above the Fold, forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in February 2025; and of two earlier chapbooks. He has won Able Muse’s Write Prize, Poetry Quarterly‘s Rebecca Lard Award, and, twice, the New England Poetry Club‘s Erika Mumford Prize for poetry about travel and international culture. His poems have appeared in About Place, AGNI, Common Ground Review, Negative Capability, Nine Mile, Pangyrus, Ploughshares, Solstice, and many other publications. From 2002 until 2020 he worked for the Arts in Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and taught English in the Boston University Prison Education Program. Now retired, he writes publicity for The Neighborhood Developers in Chelsea, Mass., and helps out in English-language and citizenship classes at the Immigrant Learning Center in Malden.
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Most of the poems in Waiting for the Light to Change, published by Prolific Press in 2017, first appeared in poetry periodicals and other places, and almost all of them in two subsequent chapbooks as well, Sidewalk Tectonics (published by Pudding House in 2009) and ​Perfect Memory (published by Finishing Line Press in 2014). His next book, Above the Fold, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.
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IN POETRY PERIODICALS AND OTHER PLACES
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"Plumbing" in the Common Ground Review
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"White Wooden Crosses" in Lyrical Somerville
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"Barrio Boston" and "Earth Day" in the Latin American Literary Review
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“The Delivery” in Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine
“My Eight-Year-Old Grandmother” in Negative Capability
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"At the Perryville Battlefield State Historic Site" and four other poems in Sixfold
“Above the Fold” and three other poems in Lights, a zine published in 2020 by Pleasure Boat Studios
“The Trees of Heaven” in About Place
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"Athens County Breakdown" in Ohio Today
“The Call,” in The Muddy River Poetry Review
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"Memphis Bus Driver" in Shadowgraph Quarterly
"La Despedida" in the Harvard Educational Review​​
"To a Cajun Farmer of Alligators on the Run from his Wife" in Doug Holder’s “Lyrical Somerville”
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Since 2022, Scott has been writing stories about clients of The Neighborhood Developers, a Community Development Corporation that serves the majority-immigrant towns of Chelsea, Everett, and Revere across the Tobin Bridge from downtown Boston. Some of his pieces appear on the "news and events" page of the TND website: https://www.theneighborhooddevelopers.org/news-and-events; others in The Neighborhood Scoop, file:///Users/owner/Downloads/TND%20Newsletter%202022_PRINT_No%20bleed%20(1).pdf; and some in the newsletters of TND's CONNECT office.
From 1999 to 2005 or so, Scott wrote monthly features for the online, Boston-based journal ArtsEditor:
“The Salvaged Poems of Theodore Roethke”—on one of the great post-WWII American poets
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“Plastic Refuge”— on “the sentimental image in contemporary art” at the DeCordova Museum
“The Urban Suburb”: on the Emerald Necklace of landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted
“A Warming Reminder”—on an exhibition of quilts by Molly Upton at the Hall School
“Starlight and Sketchpad”—on an exhibition of Gerry Bergstein’s paintings
“Winning Their Way”—on a show at the Museum of Fine Arts of artwork by Boston women, 1870-1940
“Brim, Base, and Handle”—on a ceramics show at the Society of Arts and Crafts
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During the same period at the start of this millennium, Scott wrote profiles of New England studio potters, such as Judith Motzkin, Paul Heroux, Mark Shapiro, Sarah Spademan, Nancy Selvage, Chris Gustin, and Diana Thomas, for Ceramics Monthly. During this period he also wrote a couple of pieces for the Appalachian Mountain Club’s monthly journal, Appalachia, a couple for ReVista (a periodical published by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard), several narrative “commentaries” on social issues and for the Cambridge community newspapers, and short profiles of alumni of the Harvard Graduate School of Education for Ed. magazine. Unfortunately, most of those articles are not available online.
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INTERVIEWS, PROFILES, AND VIDEOS
Interview with Linda Michel-Cassidy in The AGNI Newsletter
Biography in Doug Holder’s “Sunday Poet”
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Biography in Superstars of Culture
Live poetry reading at TEDxHGSE, May 2014
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