Mary Jo Salter was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and grew up in Detroit and Baltimore. She is Andrew W. Mellon Professor and Co-Chair of The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Her six volumes of poems include Henry Purcell in Japan (1985), Unfinished Painting (1989), Sunday Skaters (1995), A Kiss in Space (1999), Open Shutters (2004), and A Phone Call to the Future: New and Selected Poems (2008). She has also published a children’s book, The Moon Comes Home (1989), and is a co-editor of the fourth and fifth editions of The Norton Anthology of Poetry. She edited The Selected Poems of Amy Clampitt (2010).
Stephen Kampa has published poetry, critical prose, and reviews in journals such as the Southwest Review, Tampa Review, The Hopkins Review, Subtropics, Poetry Northwest, the Sewanee Theological Review, and River Styx. He is the winner of the 2011 River Styx International Poetry Contest, and his first book, Cracks in the Invisible, won the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize and a Florida Book Awards' Gold Medal in poetry. He holds degrees from Carleton College and the Johns Hopkins University and has worked as a teacher and a musician.
Read a poem by Mary Jo Salter.
Read a poem by Stephen Kampa.
Mary Jo Salter photo credit: Michael Malyzsko.
Recorded On: Wednesday, May 02, 2012