Mary Jo Salter was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and grew up in Detroit and Baltimore. She was educated at Harvard and Cambridge Universities and worked as a staff editor at The Atlantic Monthly and as poetry editor of The New Republic . A vice president of the Poetry Society of America, she is also a coeditor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry . In addition to her five poetry collections, she is the author of a children’s book, The Moon Comes Home . She is Emily Dickinson Senior Lecturer at Mount Holyoke College and lives with her family in Amherst, Massachusetts.