The Born-Digital Poetry Project: A Reading Featuring Mary Jo Bang

This event celebrates the conclusion of The Born-Digital Poetry: Planning for the Future of Literary Archives project and features acclaimed poet and translator Mary Jo Bang, whose papers in the Modern Literature Collection served as the pilot for the project. Bang will read from her collections alongside poets Ameen Animashaun, Aiden Heung, Dana Levin, and Lauris Veips. Timothy Donnelly will be reading from Chariot, his latest collection, dedicated to Bang.

Following the reading, guests are invited to a reception in the Ginkgo Room, where a curated exhibition featuring Bang’s born-digital poetry is on display. This event is co-sponsored by the Department of English and the Department of Comparative Literature & Thought.

Free and open to all, registration requested.

Speaker Bios:

Mary Jo Bang is the author of nine books of poems, including Elegy, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her most recent collection, A Film in Which I Play Everyone, was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and the PEN Voelcker Award. She has published translations of Dante’s Divine Comedy and of Colonies of Paradise, poems by Matthias Göritz, and is co-translator, with Yuki Tanaka, of A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi. Her tenth collection of poems, titled The Museum of Mary, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2027. She has a BA and MA in Sociology from Northwestern University, a BA in Photography from the Polytechnic of Central London (now Westminster University), and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University.

Ameen Animashaun is a writer whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poets.org, Rattle, Salamander, and other publications. A graduate of the MFA program at WashU, he is the recipient of the 2025 Evaristo Prize for African Poetry, the 2025 Cygnature Poetry Prize, and the 2024 Academy of American Poets A. E. Claeyssens Jr. Poetry Prize, among others. His full-length manuscript was a finalist for the 2024 Sillerman First Book Prize, and his chapbook Calling a Spade was a finalist for the 2024 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize.

Timothy Donnelly’s most recent book, Chariot, was published in 2023 by Wave Books. His previous books include The Problem of the Many, winner of the inaugural Big Other Poetry Prize, and The Cloud Corporation, winner of the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. He teaches at Columbia University School of the Arts and lives in Brooklyn with his family.

Aiden Heung is a recent immigrant to the United States, originally from a Tibetan autonomous town in China. A finalist in the Disquiet Literary International Contest, he is also the winner of the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize and the Levis Prize in Poetry. His debut collection, All There Is to Lose, selected by Ilya Kaminsky, was published in March 2026 by Four Way Books. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from WashU.

Dana Levin is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Now Do You Know Where You Are (Copper Canyon Press, 2022), a New York Times Notable Book and an NPR “Book We Love.” She has received honors from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN, the Library of Congress, and the Whiting and Guggenheim Foundations. Levin teaches in the Bennington Writing Seminars MFA program and serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Maryville University in St. Louis. Her first book of prose will be published by Graywolf Press in 2027.

Lauris Veips is a poet from Latvia and a PhD student in Comparative Literature at WashU. His second Latvian-language collection is to be released later this year with Punctum.