The English Department and the Department of Comparative Literature and Thought are pleased to announce the Mary Jo Bang Prize for Poetry Translation. Established through an endowed gift to the university, the prize honors renowned poet and translator Mary Jo Bang, esteemed professor in the English Department since 2000. The annual prize will award $1,000 to a Washington University graduate student for the English translation of three poems by a single poet.
Bang is the author of nine books of poetry—including A Film in Which I Play Everyone, which was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, a PEN Voelcker Award, and the Heartland Booksellers Award; A Doll for Throwing; and Elegy, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work has been translated into German, Spanish, and Slovenian. She has published translations of Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio, with Paradiso forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2025. She is also the translator of Colonies of Paradise: Poems by Matthias Göritz, and co-translator, with Yuki Tanaka, of A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi, published by Princeton University Press in the Lockert Poetry in Translation Series. She’s been the recipient of a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin.
Submissions:
Graduate students from any department at Washington University are invited to submit English translations of three poems by a single poet. The prize requires three translations for consideration. One or more of the translated poems may be an excerpt from a longer poetic work, but the total length of the submission should not exceed seven pages.
Translations that have been previously published by the applicant are ineligible; those under consideration for publication may be submitted.
Translations from all languages are welcome; however, in cases where the poems originally appeared in a language that is not regularly taught at Washington University, we ask the applicant to notify Professor Matthew Erlin (merlin@wustl.edu), chair of the Department of Comparative Literature and Thought, prior to the deadline so that arrangements can be made for an appropriate judge.
Translations for consideration should be submitted through the English Department Awards website: https://english.wustl.edu/awards
The deadline for submissions is April 1, 2025. (Please note: For this inaugural year of the prize, the deadline has been extended past the March 19 deadline listed for other department awards.)
