Paige Ellen Passantino is a poet from New Jersey, though Baltimore has been her home for the past fifteen years. She is a Salter Lecturer at Johns Hopkins University. She earned her MFA in poetry at Johns Hopkins, and her bachelor’s degree from Smith College as an Ada Comstock Scholar, a fellowship program for students who attend college at a non-traditional age. Paige is also an alumni of the Community College of Baltimore County. 

Paige is the recipient of the Academy of American Poets’ Anne Bradstreet Prize and the 2026 Benjamin Sankey Fellowship Prize, selected by Joy Priest. Her work appears in/on Poets.org, The Florida Review, Shō, Folio, The Coachella Review, Novus, and elsewhere. She is a nominee for 2026 Best of the Net, a finalist for the 2026 Mississippi Review prize, an honoree in the 2023 Adroit Prizes, and has received support from Tin House. She is the recipient of the Ruth Forbes Eliot Prize for poetry, a two-time recipient of the Ethel Olin Orbin prize for creative nonfiction, and has read for the Baltimore Review and the Massachusetts Review. Paige also teaches poetry workshops for incarcerated individuals with Project Poetic Justice.

She is currently at work on her debut collection, The Sugar Baby Sonnets, along with a memoir and a novel about clowns.