Mary Jo Bang

Mary Jo Bang is an American poet born on October 22, 1946, in Waynesville, Missouri. She is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Elegy (2007), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award; Apology for Want (1997), recipient of the Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize; and translations of Dante's Inferno (2012), Purgatorio (2021), and Paradiso (2025), along with honors such as a Guggenheim Fellowship (2004), Pushcart Prize (2003), and Berlin Prize Fellowship (2015).