Mark S. Burrows

After almost a decade of university teaching in Germany, the capstone to a career as scholar and teacher in the US and Europe, Mark S. Burrows, Ph.D., returned home to the States in 2020 where he makes his home in Camden, Maine.

Since returning to the States, he focuses much of his creativity on writing, devoting his energies to poetry - as a writer, editor, and facilitator of poetry retreats and workshops offered across this country and in Europe and Great Britain. He continues to edit poetry for the journal Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality, and is the Poetry Editor for Wildhouse Publications.

His long interest in Rilke's poetry led to his publication, in 2012 (revised paperback edition, 2016), of the original version of Rilke's Book of Hours, entitled Prayers of a Young Poet. This much-acclaimed edition, including some of Rilke's most beloved poems, marked the first English publication of this ground-breaking work in its first form.

As a poet, he writes with what writer Jay Parini recently described as "a profound awareness of nature and its spiritual resonances," a trait embodied in his most recent collection of poems, The Chance of Home (2018). A winner of the Wytter Bynner Prize in Poetry and numerous nominations for a Pushcart Prize, his poems offer readers what poet Christine Valters Paintner describes as "both invitation and gift--when you say yes, the treasures lay themselves out like a banquet for the heart." Poet Wally Swist characterizes his poems as "of stately simplicity and lyrical rhythms," noting that he "crafts a poetry that is resonant with what is reverential," going on to describe this recent collection as "a poetry of praise whih opens from within its own center, as does the lily."

His poems have appeared in journals published in the US and abroad, including: Poetry, Image, The Southern Quarterly, Metamorphosis, The Christian Century, The Cortland Review, The Anglican Theological Review, Eremos (Australia), Weavings, Almost Island, Reunion: The Dallas Review, 91st Meridian, Oneing, AMOS (Germany), The Tablet, First Things, The Christian Century, and The Seminary Ridge Review, among others. www.msburrows.com