Mary Biddinger was born in Fremont, California, in 1974. She grew up in Illinois and Michigan, and attended The University of Michigan (BA in English and Creative Writing), Bowling Green State University (MFA in poetry), and The University of Illinois at Chicago (Ph.D. in English, Program for Writers). She is currently an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Akron and NEOMFA: Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts program, where she teaches literature and creative writing. Her areas of specialty include poetry of the body, international poetry, and modernism.

Mary is the author of Prairie Fever (Steel Toe Books, 2007), and the new editor of the Akron Series in Poetry. She also serves on the editorial board of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Literary Review, Crazyhorse, The Iowa Review, The Laurel Review, Ninth Letter, Notre Dame Review, and Ploughshares, among other journals. She has received an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award, and an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council.

In 2007, Mary founded the new independent literary magazine Barn Owl Review, which made its debut at AWP 08 in New York. She is currently at work on a second book of poetry that reinvents Saint Monica — patron of wives in bad marriages — as a contemporary figure coming of age in the rust belt Midwest.

Mary lives in West Akron with her husband, two children, five cats, and one Beagle.