Marie Ponsot /ˌpɒnˈsoʊ/ (née Birmingham; April 6, 1921 – July 5, 2019) was an American poet, literary critic, essayist, teacher, and translator.
Ponsot was born in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of Marie Candee, a public school teacher, and William Birmingham, an importer.
After graduating from St. Joseph's College for Women in Brooklyn, Ponsot earned her master's degree in seventeenth-century literature from Columbia University.
After the Second World War, she journeyed to Paris, where she met and married Claude Ponsot, a painter[1] and student of Fernand Léger.
[1] (Years later Claude Ponsot, by then a professor, became chairman at the fine arts department of St. John's University in Queens, New York.)