Mary Biddinger is the author of numerous books with Black Lawrence Press, including Department of Elegy (2022) and Partial Genius: Prose Poems (2019). She is also co-editor, with Julie Brooks Barbour, of A Mollusk Without a Shell: Essays on Self-Care for Writers (University of Akron Press, 2024). Her debut work of fiction, a novella in linked flash stories titled The Girl with the Black Lipstick, will be published by BLP in July 2025. Biddinger teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Akron and in the NEOMFA program. She has received awards and fellowships from the Cleveland Arts Prize, Ohio Arts Council, and National Endowment for the Arts. Her current project is a new collection of prose poems about feral 1980s childhood and a close-knit block on the northwest side of Chicago.