Mary Stewart Hammond was reared in Roanoke, Virginia and Baltimore, Maryland. Her book, Out of Canaan, published by W.W. Norton, received the Great Lakes Colleges Association's “Best First Collection of Poetry” Award. She has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. Other awards include MacDowell Colony and Yaddo fellowships and a Writer's Community Poet-in-Residence fellowship.

Her poems have appeared in many magazines and journals including American Poetry Review, The American Voice, The Atlantic Monthly, Barrow Street, Boulevard, Field, The Gettysburg Review, The New Criterion, The New England Review, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Yale Review. Recent poems have appeared in The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, and The Southern Review, with new work forthcoming in The Yale Review.

Mary Stewart’s poems have been collected in many anthologies including Women’s Work: Modern Women Poets Writing in English (ed. Eva Salzman and Amy Wack), The Music Lover’s Poetry Anthology (ed. Helen Houghton and Maureen Draper), Sweet Jesus: Poems About the Ultimate Icon (ed. Nick Carbó and Denise Duhamel), Wedding Readings: Centuries of Writing and Rituals for Love and Marriage (ed. Eleanor Munro), The KGB Bar Book of Poems (ed. David Lehman and Star Black), Inventions of Farewell: A Book of Elegies (ed. Sandra M. Gilbert), Stone and Steel and Where Books Fall Open (ed. Bascove).

Mary Stewart has read and conducted workshops throughout the Midwest and the South. She now lives in New York City, where she teaches master classes in poetry through the New York Writers Workshop and works privately as a consultant on book manuscripts.