MORRI CREECH

ERICA DAWSON

JEFFREY HARRISON

JOSEPH HARRISON

J.D. MCCLATCHY

ERIC MCHENRY

MARY JO SALTER

W.D. SNODGRASS

MARK STRAND

DEBORAH WARREN

CLIVE WATKINS

RICHARD WILBUR

GREG WILLIAMSON

Mary Jo Salter was born in 1954 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She grew up in Detroit and Baltimore, and she received a BA from Harvard University, where she studied with Elizabeth Bishop. After receiving an MA in English from Cambridge University, she worked as a staff editor at The Atlantic Monthly and, some years later, as poetry editor of The New Republic. Salter’s sixth collection of poems, A Phone Call to the Future: New and Selected Poems, is forthcoming from Knopf in spring 2008. It collects new work and a substantial body of poems from her previous Knopf collections: Henry Purcell in Japan (1985); Unfinished Painting, the 1989 Lamont Selection for the year’s most distinguished second volume of poetry; Sunday Skaters, nominated in 1994 for the National Book Critics Circle Award; A Kiss in Space (1999), and Open Shutters (2003), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Salter has a children’s book to her credit, The Moon Comes Home (1989), and a play, Falling Bodies, which was first produced in 2004. In addition, she is a lyricist whose songs from the cycle Rooms of Light, set to music by Fred Hersch, premiered at The Allen Room, Lincoln Center in 2007. Icelandic composer Snorri Sigfus Birgisson premiered his work The Drift of Melancholy, a setting of three Salter poems for soprano and chamber orchestra, at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall the same year. After many years of teaching at Mount Holyoke College, she is now professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. She and her husband, writer Brad Leithauser, divide their time between Amherst, Massachusetts, and Baltimore.