Mary Jo Bang

Mary Jo Bang

​Professor of English
MFA, Columbia University
research interests:
  • Contemporary Literature
  • Poetry Writing
  • Translation
  • The Divine Comedy
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    • Washington University
      CB 1122
      One Brookings Dr.
      St. Louis, MO 63130-4899
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    Mary Jo Bang is a nationally recognized author of nine books of poems. She has been the recipient of a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, and a Berlin Prize fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin.

    Mary Jo Bang is the author of nine books of poems—including A Film in Which I Play Everyone, nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, a PEN Voelcker Award, and the Heartland Booksellers Award, A Doll for Throwing, and Elegy which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She’s published translations of Dante’s Inferno, illustrated by Henrik Drescher, and Purgatorio. Paradiso is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2025. She is also 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 in November 2024. She has a BA and MA in Sociology from Northwestern University, a BA in Photography from the Polytechnic of Central London (now Westminster University), and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. She’s been the recipient of a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin.

    Writing Excerpt

         A CALCULATION BASED ON FIGURES IN A SCENE    

         There are still many marvels, you know.
         The festivals on Fridays. The divider
         in the center of the wasteland.
         On this side—flesh; on that—an iron claw

         and a new-made screw
         fallen from the factory window
         at noon. The doll doctor pushes the arm
         back into the socket. “There,” he says.

         Day is done. He wishes he could smoke
         but he gave that up long ago.
         The rubber sole of the nurse’s right shoe
         makes a squeak when she reaches the room.

         Silence surrounds the empty bed.
         The body is elsewhere.
         “When they want more,” she says, “I give it.”
         “When they want less,” she says,

         “I take it away. I always let them choose.”
         The doctor drums his fingers
         on the doll’s flat abdomen. A sea of blood
         moves back and forth to a song of no mercy.

    From The Last Two Seconds, Mary Jo Bang (Graywolf Press, 2015)

    This poem first appeared in Kenyon Review

    Courses

    • L13 522: Poetry Workshop
    • L13 424: Poetry Tutorial

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