Mary Jane Oliver (September 10, 1935 – January 17, 2019) was an American poet who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

In an interview with the Christian Science Monitor in 1992, Oliver said of growing up in Ohio: It was pastoral, it was nice, it was an extended family.

[2] In a 2011 interview with Maria Shriver, Oliver called her family dysfunctional, adding that though her childhood was very hard, writing helped her create her own world.

Her poems are filled with imagery from her daily walks near her home:[6] shore birds, water snakes, the phases of the moon, and humpback whales.

In Long Life, she writes, "[I] go off to my woods, my ponds, my sun-filled harbor, no more than a blue comma on the map of the world but, to me, the emblem of everything.

"[12] Oliver said her favorite poets were Walt Whitman, Rumi, Hafez, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats.

[10] The Harvard Review describes her work as an antidote to "inattention and the baroque conventions of our social and professional lives.

"[14] On a visit to Austerlitz in the late 1950s, Oliver met photographer Molly Malone Cook, who became her partner for over 40 years.

[15] Of Provincetown, she said: "I too fell in love with the town, that marvelous convergence of land and water; Mediterranean light; fishermen who made their living by hard and difficult work from frighteningly small boats; and, both residents and sometime visitors, the many artists and writers.[...]

[17][18][19] In the Women's Review of Books, Maxine Kumin called Oliver an "indefatigable guide to the natural world, particularly to its lesser-known aspects.

"[1] New York Times reviewer Bruce Bennetin wrote that American Primitive "insists on the primacy of the physical"[1] and Holly Prado of Los Angeles Times Book Review wrote that it "touches a vitality in the familiar that invests it with a fresh intensity.

"[13] In her article "The Language of Nature in the Poetry of Mary Oliver", Diane S. Bond writes, "few feminists have wholeheartedly appreciated Oliver's work, and though some critics have read her poems as revolutionary reconstructions of the female subject, others remain skeptical that identification with nature can empower women.

"[20] In The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, Sue Russell wrote, "Oliver will never be a balladeer of contemporary lesbian life in the vein of Marilyn Hacker, or an important political thinker like Adrienne Rich; but the fact that she chooses not to write from a similar political or narrative stance makes her all the more valuable to our collective culture.