Mary Cornish received her Master of Fine Arts degree at Sarah Lawrence College and was the recipient of a Wallace E. Stegner Fellowship in poetry at Stanford University. She currently lives in Bellingham, Washington, where she teaches at Fairhaven College of Western Washington University.

About Red Studio:

"Because Mary Cornish owns a keen, loving eye and a susceptible heart, her poems can braid together sight and feeling so as to produce a delicacy rarely found in contemporary poetry. She takes us by the hand and leads us into rooms of wonder."
—Billy Collins

"Red Studio is a brilliant collection, even more so because it is the poet's first. In poem after poem there is a poignant intensity, often heightened by restraint, and every poem is filled with, as Mr. Stevens put it, 'ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.'"
—Thomas Lux

"As the painters once used the broken yolks of eggs, the rocks, and the earth itself to make their colors, so Mary Cornish has made these miraculous poems: so intelligently wrought the page disappears, so gorgeous I stand and stare. At the core of each is human life, fiercely known and loved and endured. These are the poems of a radiantly alive adult woman."
—Marie Howe