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Bio

Mary Jo Bang B&W Author photo Carly Ann Faye Photographer.jpg

Photographer: Carly Ann Faye

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).

        Bang can be an ingenious phrase maker, startling English out of its idiomatic slumber with subtle, deliberate awkwardness.

 

The New York Times Book Review

 

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Reviews

 

Mary Jo Bang's poetry is vivacious and at the same time mysterious. Its surface glitters with the sparkle that the brightest American writing has always given off, and in the depths it reveals a mixture of smoky, quickly complexities, a blend that is hers alone. Characters are driven to distress or exuberance by the fate she has prepared for them—their stories bloom on the page, ripen strangely, and quickly disappear. I love it."
—John Tranter

Upcoming Events

 

Thursday, July 10, 2025 7:00 pm

Mary Jo Bang discusses Paradiso,
with Stephanie Burt
Porter Square Books - Cambridge, MA

.

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© 2025 by Mary Jo Bang

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