Bruce Bennett is the author of seven full-length books of poetry and more than twenty poetry chapbooks. His most recent books are Funny Signals (FootHills Publishing, 2003), a collection of political poems and fables, and The Deserted Campus (Clandestine Press, 2003), satirical poems about college life with illustrations by David Grossvogel. His most recent chapbooks are Web-Watching (Bright Hill Press, 2005), winner of the Bright Hill Poetry Chapbook Competition; Coyote's Interlude With Little Miss Darling (FootHills Publishing, 2006); and Examined Life (Scienter Press, 2006). His New and Selected Poems, Navigating The Distances (Orchises Press), was chosen by Booklist as “One Of The Top Ten Poetry Books Of 1999.”

He received his A.B., A.M., and Ph. D. from Harvard, and taught at Oberlin College from 1967-70, where he co-founded and served as an editor of Field: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. In 1970 he moved back to Cambridge, where he co-founded and served as an editor of Ploughshares. In 1971, he married Bonnie Apgar, a Renaissance art historian, and for two years he and Bonnie lived in Florence, Italy. In 1973 he began teaching at Wells College in Aurora, NY, where he is currently Professor and Chair of English and Director of Creative Writing.

During the 1980’s and 90’s, he was an Associate Editor (with Stan Rubin and Linda Allardt) at Judith Kitchen’s State Street Press in Rochester and Brockport, NY. In 1993, he founded, with Robert Doherty and others, the Wells College Book Arts Center and Wells College Press, and served as Director of the Center and Press until 2002. Under his direction, the Wells College Press published a number of poetry chapbooks and pamphlets, as well as broadsides of poems by writers in the Wells College Visiting Writers Series.

He has reviewed contemporary poetry books in The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Harvard Review, and elsewhere, and his poems have appeared widely in literary journals, as well as numerous textbooks and anthologies.