Mary Jo Salter

Emily Dickinson Senior Lecturer in the Humanities

Specialization: The writing of poetry; poetry criticism; prosody; Emily Dickinson; W. H. Auden; Tom Stoppard

Mary Jo Salter is the author of five collections of poems: 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), as well as a children's book, The Moon Comes Home (1989). Her first play, Falling Bodies, premiered at Mount Holyoke in 2004. Salter is a coeditor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry and a lyricist who has worked with composers Allen Bonde and Fred Hersch.

She is also an essayist and reviewer for such publications as The New York Times Book Review and The Yale Review. She has received many awards, including NEA and Guggenheim fellowships. She is on the board of the Amy Clampitt Fund, the Bogliasco Foundation, and The Kenyon Review, and has been Vice President of the Poetry Society of America since 1995.

In a recent article in the Washington Post, Rita Dove describes Salter as "an exemplar of the New Formalism, a term coined to describe a community of young poets dedicated to infusing formal verse with a new energy and suppleness." Dove notes that in the Salter poem "Absolute September," the poet writes in a form that is "extremely difficult to carry off without sounding hokey, but Salter revels in this formal challenge without missing a beat." Poet Carolyn Kizer has written of Salter's work, "These are poems of breathtaking elegance: in formal control, in intellectual subtlety, in learning lightly displayed."

Salter regularly teaches courses in composition, verse writing, poetry criticism, and modern poetry and drama. She is married to novelist Brad Leithauser, with whom she shares her position in the English department (as well as a Mount Holyoke honor, the 2004 Meribeth E. Cameron Faculty Award for Scholarship), and two daughters.

News Links:

"MHC Duo Write Poetry on NewsHour," PBS, February 14, 2007

"Poetry in Motion: Student Writers Develop Their Craft Under the Tutelage of Great American Writers," Vista, Fall 1999

Mount Holyoke College Baccalaureate Address, May 20, 2000

Knopf: Poetry: Mary Jo Salter