Bianca Stone was born and raised in Vermont. She received her Bachelor of Arts from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, OH in 2006, and Master of Fine Arts from NYU’s Creative Writing Program in 2009. Stone lived in New York City for many years with her partner, Ben Pease, where she worked as a freelance teacher, personal assistant and co-founder and editor of the now defunct small press, Monk Books. Stone is a long time lover and purveyor of small presses and books arts. Her two poetry chapbooks Someone Else’s Wedding Vows and I Saw the Devil with His Needlework, were published by the small press Argos Books (NYC); and her poetry comics (an experimental form of visual poetry) were published by Factory Hollow Press, (Amherst, MA). Stone’s first full-length collection of poetry, Someone Else’s Wedding Vows, was published collaboratively by Tin House Books and Octopus Books in 2014, edited by Matthew Dickman. After graduating from NYU Stone continued a strange “comic book” collaboration with Anne Carson and Robert Currie on an illuminated version of Antigonick: a book of Carson’s brilliant translation of Sophocles’ Antigone, which came out from New Directions in 2012. It was at this time that Stone was exploring and honing ideas around the uses (and failures) of poetry and images.

During her time in New York City (2007-2016) Stone worked on and off with the poet John Ashbery, and his partner David Kermani, moderating various seminars and lectures on Ashbery’s process. This collaboration would become an integral part of her personal pedagogy around poetry: using interdisciplinary study of music, art, film and reading within the form of the poem. Bianca Stone first full-length visual art book, Poetry Comics From the Book of Hours, came out from Pleiades, 2016, and has since been reprinted in a second edition (2023). Her second poetry collection, The Möbius Strip Club of Grief came out from Tin House, 2018. This book explores the plain and weird grief worked through after losing her grandmother, the poet Ruth Stone; facing the psychical intricacies of disturbed familial systems. Möbius Strip weaves in and out of a surreal landscape of the strip club as a way to explore the exhibitionism, pain and pleasure of grief and love. The poems have a fraught dyadic conversation with her grandmother’s poetry, including in the very title itself which was a riff on Ruth Stone’s poem, “The Möbius Strip of Grief.” Stone’s commissioned poetry comic children’s book, A Little Called Pauline, with text by the poet Gertrude Stein, came out from Penny Candy Books in 2020. Stone has since taken an indefinite break from all visual art except a new project with film.

Stone’s newest book is What is Otherwise Infinite, from Tin House Books (January of 2022). This book is the real beginning of a larger exploration of the psychoanalytical, phenomenological and philosophical as they overlap with the language and movement of the poetic. This is the newest exploration in Stone’s film project with is an attempt to visually portray and explore conversation with self, and reader/other; what would it look like in film, within the skit, to explore the personal and universal in the mythopoetic sphere.

Stone’s poems, art, book reviews and essays have appeared in a variety of magazines including The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and many others. She returned to Vermont in 2016 with her husband and collaborator, Ben Pease, and had a baby they named Odette. The reason to return to Vermont was mainly to work on the Ruth Stone House, a nonprofit Stone helped found, in part to fulfill Ruth Stone’s wish that her estate–which has been left in trust to her and several others–be used solely for the “furthering of poetry and the literary arts;” but equally in part of Stone’s own desire to create a structure in which to explore new ways of teaching and writing poetry, as well as expanding into a metapoetic interdisciplinary learning community.

Ruth Stone’s farm house and property in Goshen, VT was in dire disrepair and neglect and had no income or financial seed money. It has taken many years of fundraising efforts to rescue, begin and sustain this project. The Ruth Stone House now is run by Bianca Stone, Walter Stone and Ben Pease and a small staff–all volunteer. Stone teaches classes, hosts events, and is director of programs. The house has a fully functional letterpress studio and serves as a poetry center. While the physical space is still being fixed up, soon will be an overnight artists residency and MFA alternative education program base. What began as a mission to save the home of a great American poet, the Ruth Stone House project has expanded out to be one of nurturing the health of the Vermont poetry community, as well as the virtual community at large. The Ruth Stone House is a vivid and dynamic enterprise, with online classes, in-person retreats, a popular literary Magazine ITERANT, (where Stone is editor at large); and houses the Ode & Psyche Podcast, where Stone talks about the intricate link between poetry and consciousness. (Read more here)