
Mary Biddinger
Program Director | Poetry & Flash Fiction | University of Akron

Contact
Phone | (330) 972-6960
Email | marybid@uakron.edu
Web | www.marybiddinger.com
Recent Publications
SELECTED BOOKS
The Girl with the Black Lipstick. Black Lawrence Press, July 2025.
A Mollusk Without a Shell: Essays on Self-Care for Writers. University of Akron Press, March 2024.
Department of Elegy. Black Lawrence Press, January 2022.
Partial Genius: Prose Poems. Black Lawrence Press, August 2019.
Small Enterprise. Black Lawrence Press, August 2015.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
"We Are Weird and We Are Not Alone: A Conversation with Mary Biddinger" at The Rumpus
Two prose poems at Under a Warm Green Linden
“Everyone Rise, the Gavel’s Coming Down” at HAD
“Everyone Knows a Killdeer Means No Harm” at the Cuyahoga Valley Poetic Inventory
About Mary
Mary Biddinger is the Program Director for the NEOMFA and teaches poetry writing, fiction writing, and literature at the University of Akron. Her most recent book is a novella-in-flash titled The Girl with the Black Lipstick, which chronicles the adventures and misadventures of two graduate students in the late 90s (Black Lawrence Press, 2025). Biddinger is also the author of numerous poetry collections with Black Lawrence Press, including Department of Elegy (2022) and Partial Genius: Prose Poems (2019). The essay collection A Mollusk Without a Shell: Essays on Self-Care for Writers, co-edited with Julie Brooks Barbour, was published by the University of Akron Press in 2024.
Biddinger has been the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, Ohio Arts Council, National Endowment for the Arts, and Cleveland Arts Prize. She is currently working on a collection of prose poems about feral Chicago childhood and its reverberations later in life. Check out her recent publications here.
Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts
Department of English
Cleveland State University
Music & Communications Building 234
2121 Euclid Avenue
Cleveland, Ohio 44115
(216) 687-3957
info@neomfa.org
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