Mary Jo Salter is a poet, lyricist, playwright, and essayist, whose latest collection of poems, A Phone Call to the Future: New and Selected Poems , was published in March 2008.

This, her sixth volume, collects new work and a substantial body of poems from her previous Knopf collections: Henry Purcell in Japan (1985); Unfinished Painting , the 1989 Lamont Selection for the year's most distinguished second volume of poetry; Sunday Skaters , nominated in 1994 for the National Book Critics Circle Award; A Kiss in Space (1999), and Open Shutters (2003), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Salter has a children's book to her credit, The Moon Comes Home (1989), and a play, Falling Bodies , which was first produced in 2004.

In addition, she is a lyricist whose songs from the cycle Rooms of Light, set to music by Fred Hersch, premiered at The Allen Room, Lincoln Center in 2007. Icelandic composer Snorri Sigfus Birgisson premiered his work "The Drift of Melancholy," a setting of three Salter poems for soprano and chamber orchestra, at Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall the same year.

Salter was born on August 15, 1954 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She grew up there and in Detroit and Baltimore. She was educated at Harvard and at Cambridge, and worked as a staff editor at The Atlantic Monthly and as Poetry Editor of The New Republic before becoming a co-editor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry (4th edition, 1996; 5th edition, 2005).

Salter's essays and reviews appear in The New York Times Book Review and other publications. She has received numerous awards, including NEA and Guggenheim fellowships. She has lived abroad for extended periods, in Japan, England, Italy, Iceland, and France. After many years of teaching at Mount Holyoke College, she is now Professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. She and her husband, the writer Brad Leithauser, have two grown children, Emily and Hilary, and divide their time between Amherst, Massachusetts and Baltimore, Maryland.