Mary Ann Caws

Mary Ann Caws (b. 1933, Wilmington, North Carolina) is an American scholar, translator, and poet who has taught for many decades as Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is one of the foremost Anglophone scholars of French Surrealism and twentieth-century French literature and the visual arts.

Her work spans critical studies of André Breton, Paul Éluard, René Char, and Tristan Tzara; translations of French poetry into English, including the collected poems of Breton and Saint-John Perse; and books on the relationship between poetry and painting that include The Eye in the Text (1981) and Reading Frames in Modern Fiction (1985). She has also written about Virginia Woolf, Pablo Picasso, and Joseph Cornell. Her approach consistently foregrounds the intersection of visual and verbal experience, arguing for a mode of reading that is attentive to the material and spatial dimensions of the literary text. She has published more than fifty books, and her translations have made a substantial body of French Surrealist poetry available to Anglophone readers.

She received the MLA's Distinguished Scholarly Book Award and has been decorated by the French government as Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.