Events Calendar

Join us on Tuesday, Oct. 25 at 5:30 p.m. in the Old Capitol Museum Senate Chamber for the inaugural talk of the Ancient Exchanges speaker series! Mary Jo Bang, nationally recognized poet and Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, will be giving a talk titled, "The Truth is Rarely Pure: Translating Dante."

Mary Jo Bang was born in Missouri and grew up in Cool Valley, outside of St. Louis. She originally studied sociology, earning both her BA and MA in the subject from Northwestern University. She earned a BA in photography from the Polytechnic of Central London, and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. She is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including A Doll for Throwing (2017); The Last Two Seconds (2015); The Bride of E (2009); Elegy (2007), which won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award; Louise in Love (2001); The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans (2001); and Apology for Want (1997), which received the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize. In 2012 she published a translation of Inferno by Dante Aligheri.

The Ancient Exchanges speaker series is co-sponsored by the Department of Classics, the Translation Program, the International Writing Program, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop.