Mary Jo Bang

Mary Jo Bang is the author of nine books of poems—including A Film in Which I Play Everyone (Graywolf, 2023), A Doll for Throwing (Graywolf, 2017), and Elegy (Graywolf, 2009), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has published translations of Dante’s Inferno (Graywolf, 2013), illustrated by Henrik Drescher, Purgatorio (Graywolf, 2021), and Colonies of Paradise: Poems by Matthias Göritz (Northwestern University Press, 2022). She is also the co-translator, with Yuki Tanaka, of A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi (Princeton, 2024). Her translation of Paradiso is forthcoming with Graywolf in July, 2025. She is a professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, where she teaches creative writing.