Of language, of poetry, of memory: In conversation with Mary Jo Bang

Every so often, you encounter someone who has done so much so well that it becomes difficult to capture the extent of their accomplishments. Mary Jo is one of those people.

She’s published nine books of poetry and numerous works of translation, with another — Dante’s Paradiso — forthcoming later this year. Her poems have been selected for inclusion in the Best American Poetry series multiple times, and she’s taught everywhere from Yale University to the New School to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Among the many awards she has received for her work are a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and a National Book Critics Circle Award.

It was a privilege to get to learn more about the life and writing of a poet whose work is as formidable in thought as it is wide-ranging in its cultural impact.

Link to interview: womenofletters.substack.com/p/mary-jo-bang

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Mary Jo Bang is the author of nine books of poems—including A Film in Which I Play Everyone, which was 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 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. She has a BA and an 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. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

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Song: “Walk Through the Park,” by TrackTribe