Mary Jo Salter was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and grew up in Detroit and Baltimore. She was educated at Harvard and Cambridge and worked as a staff editor at The Atlantic Monthly and as poetry editor of The New Republic. In addition to her seven previous poetry collections, she is the author of a children’s book, The Moon Comes Home, a coeditor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry, and is a playwright and lyricist. After many years of teaching at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, she is now Krieger-Eisenhower Professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.