Mary Jo Bang

Mary Jo Bang  is a poet and a translator. She was born in Waynesville, Missouri and grew up in Ferguson. She has a BA and MA in Sociology from Northwestern University, a BA in Photography from the Polytechnic of Central London (now Westminster University), and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. From 1995–2005 she was the poetry co-editor at Boston Review. She’s been the recipient of a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and a 2015 Berlin Prize fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin. A Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, she is the author of nine books of poems: Apology for Want (1997, winner of the Bakeless Prize); Louise in Love (2001, winner of the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America); The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans (2001, winner of the Contemporary Poetry Award from the University of Georgia Press); The Eye Like a Strange Balloon (2004); Elegy (2007, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book); The Bride of E (2009); The Last Two Seconds (2015); A Doll for Throwing (2017); and A Film in Which I Play Everyone (2023, nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, a PEN Voelcker Award, and the Heartland Booksellers Award). Her translation of Dante's Inferno, with illustrations by Henrik Drescher, was published by Graywolf Press in 2012; Purgatorio was published in 2021, and Paradiso in 2025. She is also the translator of Colonies of Paradise, Poems by Matthias Göritz (Northwestern University Press, 2022) and the co-translator, with Yuki Tanaka, of A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi (Princeton University Press, 20224).