Nationality 1: American

Birthdate: 1946

Born in the central Missouri town of Waynesville in 1946, Mary Jo Bang grew up in St. Louis. She went to college at Northwestern University, where she earned a bachelor's degree and then a master's degree in sociology, graduating summa cum laude. Bang also earned a bachelor's degree in photography from the University of Westminster in central London and a master's in creative writing at Columbia University.

Bang's first collection of poetry, the intellectual and allusive Apology for Want, was published in 1997 and awarded the Breadloaf Bakeless Prize as well as the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. In 2001, Bang went on to publish The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans, which won the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series Competition. That same year, she published another collection of poetry entitled Louise in Love, which received an Alice Fay di Castagnola...