SCOTT RUESCHER
ABOUT
Scott Ruescher is the author of the full-length poetry collection Waiting for the Light to Change (Prolific Press, 2017) 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, The Common Ground Review, Negative Capability, Ploughshares, The Evening Street Review, Solstice, The Tower Journal, 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.
Waiting for the Light to Change published by Prolific Press
Sidewalk Tectonics published by Pudding House
Perfect Memory published by Finishing Line Press
IN POETRY PERIODICALS AND OTHER PLACES
“The Delivery” in Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine
“My Eight-Year-Old Grandmother” in Negative Capability
“Above the Fold,” “At Hamilton and Pearl,” “Tag,” and “Tenskwatawa,” in Lights, a zine published in 2020 by Pleasure Boat Studios
“The Trees of Heaven” in About Place
“The Call,” in The Muddy River Poetry Review
"Memphis Bus Driver" in Shadowgraph Quarterly
"La Despedida" in the Harvard Educational Review
“Elegy for Omayra Sánchez: in Tower Journal
“For Nefertiti Negrón” in Tower Journal
“Looking for Lorca” in Tower Journal
"The Apology" in the Short North Gazette
"The Bomb" in the Short North Gazette
"Hallucination at Hoover Reservoir" in the Short North Gazette
"To a Cajun Farmer of Alligators on the Run from his Wife" in Doug Holder’s “Lyrical Somerville”
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
“Plastic Refuge”— on the “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
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 Scott 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.
INTERVIEWS, PROFILES, AND VIDEOS
Interview with Linda Michel-Cassidy in The AGNI Newsletter
Biography in Doug Holder’s “Sunday Poet”
Biography in Superstars of Culture
Live poetry reading at TEDxHGSE, May 2014
