Mary Jo Bang

Mary Jo Bang is an American poet. In her most recent collection, The Bride of E, she uses a distinctive mix of humor, directness, and indirection, to sound the deepest sort of anguish: the existential condition. Bang fashions her examination of the lived life into an abecedarius—the title of the first poem, "ABC Plus E: Cosmic Aloneness Is the Bride of Existence," posits the collection's central problem, and a symposium of figures from every register of our culture (from Plato to Pee-wee Herman, Mickey Mouse to Sartre) is assembled to help confront it.

Bang is the author of five previous books of poetry: Apology for Want, Louise in Love, The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans, The Eye Like a Strange Balloon and Elegy, which won the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and was named a 2008 New York Times Notable Book. She’s been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. She has an M.F.A. from Columbia University, an M.A. and B.A. in Sociology from Northwestern University, and a B.A. in Photography from the Polytechnic of Central London. From 1995-2005 she was the poetry co-editor at Boston Review. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri, where she is a Professor of English and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Washington University.