Mary Biddinger is a writer, editor, and professor who lives in Akron, Ohio. She is Professor of English at the University of Akron, where she is on the faculty of the NEOMFA creative writing program. Her most recent books are Partial Genius: Prose Poems (Black Lawrence Press, 2019) and Department of Elegy (Black Lawrence Press, 2022).

Biddinger’s current project is a flash fiction novella about the adventures of graduate school roommates in late-1990s Chicago. Her stories can be found at DIAGRAM, Gone Lawn, On the Seawall, and West Trestle Review. Poems have recently appeared in The Adroit Journal, Bennington Review, Crazyhorse, The Hunger, Rogue Agent, and Thrush Poetry Journal.

Biddinger teaches literature and creative writing courses, including contemporary poetry, world literature, and women poets, and both introductory and advanced poetry writing. Her MFA course offerings include poetry and hybrid prose workshops, and craft and theory courses on themes such as Poetry of the Body and First Books of Poetry. Since 2008 she has edited the Akron Series in Poetry at the University of Akron Press.

Biddinger is the author of numerous previous poetry collections: Prairie Fever (Steel Toe Books, 2007), the chapbook Saint Monica (Black Lawrence Press, 2011), O Holy Insurgency (Black Lawrence Press, 2013), A Sunny Place with Adequate Water (Black Lawrence Press, 2014), Small Enterprise (Black Lawrence Press, 2015), and a collaboration with Jay Robinson titled The Czar (Black Lawrence Press, 2016). She is also the co-editor of a volume of essays, The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics (with John Gallaher, University of Akron Press, 2011). 

Biddinger has received the mid-career Cleveland Arts Prize in Literature (2019), as well as several Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards in Creative Writing for her poetry. She was also the recipient of a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in poetry.

Learn more about Mary Biddinger’s work at Black Lawrence Press and on Twitter at @marybid. 

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the National Endowment for the Arts for its support.

This artist was awarded the Ohio Arts Council’s Individual Excellence Award in Poetry.