Mary Jo Bang was born in 1946 in Missouri and grew up in Cool Valley, outside of St. Louis. She originally studied sociology, earning both her BA and MA in the subject from Northwestern University. She earned a BA in photography from the Polytechnic of Central London, and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. She is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Apology for Want (1997), which received the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize; Louise in Love (2001); The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans (2001); Elegy (2007), which won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award; The Bride of E (2009) and A Doll for Throwing (2017). Her translation of Dante’s Inferno was published by Graywolf Press in 2012. A translation of Purgatorio is forthcoming in 2021.
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