Mary Jo Bang (born October 22, 1946 in Waynesville, Missouri) is an American poet.
She grew up in Ferguson, Missouri. She graduated from Northwestern University, in sociology, from the Polytechnic of Central London, and from Columbia University, with an M.F.A. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
Her work has appeared in
New American Writing,
Paris Review,
The New Yorker,
The New Republic,
Denver Quarterly and
Harvard Review.
Bang was the poetry co-editor of the
Boston Review from 1995 to 2005. She was a judge for the 2004
James Laughlin Award.
Bang has received numerous honors and awards for her work, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Bellagio Foundation, and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. She has received a “Discovery”/
The Nation award, a Pushcart Prize, and her poems have been included in multiple editions of
The Best American Poetry. The editor of the
Boston Review from 1995-2005, she is currently a professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
She lives in St. Louis, Missouri.
Photograph by Larry D. Moore CC BY-SA 4.0.