A native of Memphis, Tennessee, William Arthur Ruleman III began his formal training in art at the age of twelve under the direction of Memphis-based Hungarian-American portrait artist Paul Penczner. Afterwards, he studied art at the Universities of the South, Virginia, Memphis, and North Carolina at Greensboro. Returning from a two-month trip to Europe, where he visited numerous art museums, he resumed study under Penczner and received some commissions, with one of his portraits finding its way into an issue of People magazine in 1984. Drawn to the study of literature and creative writing as well as to painting, he received his B. A. in English at the University of Virginia, his M. A. at the University of Memphis, and pursued a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at the University of Arkansas before earning a Ph.D. in English literature at the University of Mississippi in 1994. Dr. Ruleman has published two books of his poems and a chapbook of his translations of the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke . His interest in combining his passions for writing and painting led him to apply for and receive a Mellon Fellowship in 2006 to participate in a Salzburg Seminar, chaired by the director of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D. C., to examine the topic of biography as expressed through the written word and portraiture Dr. Ruleman is a current member of the Portrait Society of America.
