The Sunday Poet: Marguerite Bouvard

Marguerite Bouvard

For many years, Marguerite Bouvard  was a professor of political science at Regis College and a director of poetry workshops. She is the author or 12 non-fiction books in the area of women and human rights as well as 8 books of poetry, two of which have received awards. Both her poetry and essays have been widely anthologized.
Marguerite has received fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute, the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women and from the Puffin Foundation. She has been a writer in residence at the University of Maryland and has had residencies at the MacDowell Colony, the Yaddo Foundation, the Djerassi Foundation, the Leighton Artists’ colony at the Banff Centre and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Marguerite’s activities as a resident scholar include organizing the first Tillie K. Lubin Symposium, as well as sponsoring lecture series on women and human rights and on environmental racism. Marguerite was also a founding editor of the All Sides of Ourselves publication series. She continues to organize panels for Women’s History Month and has had two collaborative exhibits at the Dreitzer Gallery and one at the gallery in the Women’ Studies Research Center.

Current Projects

Research on the wars in Iraq and Syria, and the international response to refugees.

 In Secluded Cove

Beyond Poela Bay, naupaka, creeping vine

with its maze of bark like stems,

gleaming white buds, holds

the volcanic and granite rocks

that rise above the clanging ocean,

covers up the flotsam dumped

by the heavy surf, keeping water

in its leaves in time of drought

and traveling in waves over the mountains

as the earth that is laid bare

changes, and turns on its molten

core, its story humming

around us that will outlast the jeeps

and trucks on winding roads,

those who build fires at night

leaving empty bottles

and trash behind them,

the wet cement of the highways.