Mary Mackey
Mary Mackey has a B.A. from Harvard and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Her published works include seven collections of poetry, including Sugar Zone, winner of the 2012 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence (Marsh Hawk Press 2011) and her latest collection Travelers With No Ticket Home (Marsh Hawk Press 2014). She is also the author of thirteen novels including Immersion (Shameless Hussy Press 1972) which has recently been re-published by the Authors Guild.
Mackey’s poems have been praised by Wendell Berry, Jane Hirshfield, Dennis Nurkse, Ron Hansen, Dennis Schmitz, and Marge Piercy for their beauty, precision, originality, and extraordinary range. Four times Garrison Keillor has featured her poetry on his program The Writer’s Almanac. Mackey’s works have been on The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle bestseller lists, sold over a million and a half copies, and been translated into twelve foreign languages including Japanese, Hebrew, Greek, Russian, and Finnish. She is past president of the West Coast branch of PEN, a Fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Professor Emeritus of English at California State University, Sacramento. For the last twenty years she has been traveling to Brazil with her husband, Angus Wright, who writes about land reform and environmental issues.
At present she is working on The Village of Bones: Sabalah’s Tale, a prequel to her bestselling novel The Year The Horses Came, as well as new series of poems which combines Portuguese and English to evoke the lyrical space that lies at the conjunction of the two languages. You can learn more about her, read her blog interview series People Who Make Books Happen, get access to free resources for teachers and writers on her Educators Page, and sample her work at http://marymackey.com You can also connect with her on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/marymackeywriter and subscribe to her quarterly Newsletter at http://eepurl.com/CrLHT MMary’s literary papers are archived at the Sophia Smith Special Collections Library at Smith College, Northampton MA. Website: http://marymackey.com