Mary Di Lucia is a New York–based poet and writer best known for works that exist at the intersection of photography and literature. Although she is not herself a photographer, her creative practice is deeply bound to photographic narratives. She has been described by independent arts organizations as a poet exploring places real and imagined, from a dreamlike Russia to a future Antarctica, and she has collaborated directly with photographers to investigate how images generate stories.

Her most prominent publication is Accompaniments, a collection of stories issued by Red Hook Editions in 2017. The book originated as a response to a series of black-and-white photographs of St. Petersburg, and each written piece functions as a kind of literary accompaniment to an image, exploring the psychological and historical textures that photographs can evoke. The title itself suggests a relationship of parity between word and image, rather than illustration or caption. This book has been noted in sources such as The Brooklyn Rail and the Center for Book Arts, which profiles her as an educator dedicated to social justice and equity.

Di Lucia also engages with photographers through direct collaborations. A featured conversation and video with the Russian-born photographer Igor Posner, presented by the School of Visual Arts, documents their extended collaboration and mutual exploration of photographic narrative, memory, and music. Such exchanges indicate that her work is not merely ekphrastic but dialogic: she treats photography as a partner in constructing narrative meaning, often probing the limits of language against the visual record.

Beyond writing, Di Lucia has been active as an educator and as a contributor to literary and arts publications. Her profile appears in the Independent Curators International directory, indicating involvement in curatorially oriented projects, and she has published poetry that ranges across speculative geography—an imagined Russia, a future Antarctica—suggesting an interest in how place is figured in imagination and memory. This combination of literal collaborations and conceptual range distinguishes her from conventional poet-commentators.

For collectors of photobooks and photography-driven literature, Accompaniments matters because it exemplifies a contemporary model of word-image co-authorship: rather than being a retrospective essay about photographs, the book stands as a creative response that deepens the images’ resonance. Its publication by Red Hook Editions, a Brooklyn-based independent press, and its focus on St. Petersburg photography situate it within a wider tradition of literary-photographic projects that question the authority of either medium alone. While Di Lucia’s output is not extensive, her work offers a useful entry point for those interested in the conceptual exchange between photography and poetic prose.

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