SHORT BIO

Sally Wen Mao is the author of the poetry collection The Kingdom of Surfaces (Graywolf Press, August 2023), a finalist for the 2023 Maya Angelou Book Prize. Her debut fiction collection, Ninetails, is released from Penguin Books in May 2024. She is the author of two previous poetry collections, Oculus (Graywolf Press, 2019), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014). Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2013 and 2021, The Paris Review, Granta, Poetry, A Public Space, Harpers Bazaar, The Washington Post, and others. The recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, she was recently a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library and a Shearing Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute. She has taught writing at NYU, Cornell, and Sarah Lawrence College, and will be an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Baruch College in 2024.

LONG BIO

Sally Wen Mao is the author of the poetry collection The Kingdom of Surfaces (Graywolf Press, August 2023), and the debut fiction collection Ninetails (Penguin Books, May 2024). She is also the author of Oculus (Graywolf Press), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. Oculus was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2019, a Best Reviewed Poetry Book of 2019 from Book Marks, an NPR Favorite Book of 2019, a Library Journal’s Best Poetry Book of 2019, and a Best Poetry Book of 2019 from Marie Claire. Oculus has been featured or reviewed by Nylon, The Washington Post, Lit Hub, NPR, Vulture, O Magazine, The Millions, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, Poets&Writers, and The New Yorker, among others. Her first book, Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014), was the winner of the 2012 Kinereth Gensler Award, a Poets & Writers Top Ten Debut of 2014, a Publishers Weekly Top Ten Anticipated Pick of Fall 2014, and one of Bustle’s 14 Best Debut Collections of the Last Five Years.

Her work has won a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts grant, a 2022 and 2017 Pushcart Prize and a 2016 Amy Award from Poets & Writers. Her poems are anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2021, The Best of the Net 2014, and The Best American Poetry 2013. Recent poems are published or forthcoming in The Paris Review, Granta, New England Review, Harpers Bazaar, A Public Space, Poetry, Black Warrior Review, Guernica, The Missouri Review, and Tin House, among other journals. Recent fiction can be found in The Georgia Review, Guernica, Indiana Review, PEN America and Hyphen Magazine. Recent essays are published in Nylon, Rookie On Love, The Kenyon Review, The Believer, and other magazines.

The recipient of fellowships and scholarships from Kundiman, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Lannan Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Hedgebrook, Vermont Studio Center, and Saltonstall Foundation, Mao holds an M.F.A. from Cornell University. She has taught writing classes and workshops at Cornell University, Hunter College, the National University of Singapore, The George Washington University, Sarah Lawrence College, and NYU, among others. She was the 2015-2016 Singapore Creative Writing Residency Writer-in-Residence, a 2016-2017 Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library, and the 2017-2018 Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington at the George Washington University, and the 2021 Shearing Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas. She will be an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Baruch College in 2024.