Sally Wen Mao

Sally Wen Mao is the author of three poetry collections: The Kingdom of Surfaces (Graywolf, 2023), finalist for the Maya Angelou Book Prize by the Kansas City Public Library; Oculus (Graywolf, 2019), finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014). Her debut fiction collection, Ninetails, was released from Penguin Books in May 2024.

Mao is 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, a Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington at the George Washington University, and a Shearing Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute. She has taught writing at NYU, Cornell, and Sarah Lawrence College, and is currently an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Baruch College. She is also currently the Poetry Editor of The Believer Magazine.

She holds a B.A. in Creative Writing from Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing – Poetry from Cornell University.