Mary Jo Bang is a poet with eight collections of poems—including Elegy, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award—and a translation of Dante's Inferno, illustrated by Henrik Drescher. She teaches creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis. Her translations of poems from Colonies of Paradise by Matthias Göritz have been published or are forthcoming in the Believer, Columbia Journal, Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, Plume, and Poetry Magazine. The title poem “Colonies of Paradise” was awarded a 2018 Gulf Coast Prize in Translation, judged by Ilya Kaminsky.