Mara Adamitz Scrupe
Mara Adamitz Scrupe is a visual artist, writer, documentary filmmaker and the recipient of divers creative grants and fellowships. Her cross-disciplinary creative practice explores a terrain of psychic, emotional and physical kinship with nature; her installations, artist books, sculptures, drawings, poems, and essays investigate how we as thinking animals are shaped and changed – emotionally, socially, politically, and spiritually – by our interdependencies with the natural world. Correlatively, Mara’s writing reflects on ideas of place-ness; her poems evoke palpable experiences of land, landscapes, plants and animals in extended ruminations on migration and mobility, displacement and dynamism, voyaging and settling in.
Her publications include four full poetry collections: REAP a flora (2023, Shipwreckt Books), in the bare bones house of was (2020, Brighthorse Books Prize in Poetry, shortlisted 2024 Rubery Book Award/ UK), Eat The Marrow (2019, erbacce-press Poetry Book Prize/ UK; shortlisted 2020 Rubery Book Award/ UK), and BEAST (2014, Stevens Manuscript Publication Prize, National Federation of State Poetry Societies/ U.S).
Mara has selections in generational anthologies by Southword/ Munster Literature, Aesthetica, Stony Thursday, and 64 Best Poets/ Black Mountain Press, and poems in key UK and US journals including Radar, Rhino, Tupelo, Cincinnati Review, The London Magazine, Mslexia, Magma, Abridged, and The Poetry Business/ Smith Doorstop.
Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize in Poetry, she has won or been shortlisted for significant literary awards including Aesthetica Poetry Prize, Arts University Bournemouth International Poetry Prize, Magma Pamphlet Publication Award, Gregory O’Donohugh International Poetry Prize, Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize and National Poetry Society UK. She wrote, co-directed, and co-edited the full-length documentary Love Letter to Letter; released in 2020, the film chronicles dramatic changes in the lives of families living in post-agricultural rural communities in Minnesota (where she was born and raised), and it was recently awarded the esteemed MOZAIK Philanthropy (Los Angeles) EcosystemX Future Artist Prize for art that “rethinks existing paradigms and co-creates positive futures through the visionary power of art.”
Mara is a fellow of the MacDowell Colony and the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Most recently she served as Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Morris, and she is Dean and Professor Emerita, School of Art, University of the Arts, Philadelphia. Mara lives with her husband on their farm bordering the James River in Virginia. www.scrupe.com www.lovelettertoleader.com