Mary Jo Bang

Mary Jo Bang is the author of nine books of poems—including A Film in Which I Play Everyone, A Doll for Throwing, and Elegy, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has published translations of Dante’s Inferno, illustrated by Henrik Drescher (Graywolf Press 2012), and Purgatorio (Graywolf Press 2021). Paradiso is forthcoming in 2025. She is the translator of Colonies of Paradise: Poems by Matthias Göritz and co-translator, with Yuki Tanaka, of A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi—forthcoming from Princeton University Press (the Lockert Poetry in Translation Series) in 2024. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.