Award-Winning Poet Mary Jo Bang Visits Midwest Poets Series

Mary Jo Bang, one of the pre-eminent poets in the country and a long-time St. Louis resident, and author of eight books of poems, will present her work as part of the Midwest Poets Series at 7 p.m. Monday, Nov. 16, in Mabee Theater.

Bang’s most recent book, The Bride of E, appeared this October from Graywolf Press. Many critics compare her style to that of Emily Dickinson, where Bang and Dickinson often render the same ambitious feelings. “The poet doubts the redemptive power of her own gift,” writes David Orr in The New York Times, in discussing Bang’s elegies, “while simultaneously using it to find a tone that – in the final line – wavers perfectly between her contempt for consolation and her desire for it.”

Her numerous awards include a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, a National Book Critics Circle award and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. She is on the permanent faculty at Washington University where she is an associate professor of English and a former director of the Creative Writing Program.

Admission, at the door, is $3. Mabee Theater is located in Sedgwick Hall on the Rockhurst University Campus, 54th Street and Troost Avenue. For more information, call The Center for Arts and Letters at (816) 501-4607.