Like Jean Auel and Marion Zimmer Bradley, Mary Mackey takes us to a place where myth and reality meet. The year is 3643 B.C.E. The great matriarchal cities which have dominated the earth are about to disappear as hordes of nomads overrun the fertile valleys of Mesopotamia. Born into one of these tribes is Inanna, a woman who speaks the language of plants and whose touch can heal. Led by her powers to the City of the Dove, where love is sacred and sex is an act of worship, Inanna fulfills her destiny by becoming a great warrior queen.
Related through her father's family to Mark Twain, Mary Mackey graduated from Harvard and received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan. During her twenties, she lived in the rain forests of Costa Rica. Her published works include thirteen novels and six collections of poetry.
For a number of years, she has been traveling to Brazil and incorporating her experiences into her fiction and poetry. Four of her novels (The Widow's War, The Year The Horses Came, The Horses At The Gate, and The Fires of Spring) incorporate some of the rituals of the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomble. In 2005 she took a boat up a tributary of the Amazon, traveling over two thousand miles through flooded jungle. In June 2009, she made another trip to one of the headwaters of the Amazon on the Rio Tocantins
Her works have appeared on the New York Times Bestseller List and been translated into twelve foreign languages including Japanese, Hebrew, Greek, Russian, and Finnish. A screenwriter as well as a novelist and poet, she has sold feature-length screenplays to Warner Brothers as well as to independent film companies. John Korty directed the filming of her original award-winning screenplay Silence. The film rights to her comic novel The Stand-In were recently optioned by director Renee De Palma of OneMotion Pictures. Three times, Garrison Keillor has read her poetry on The Writer's Almanac.
At present, she lives in northern California with her husband Angus Wright, and is Professor Emeritus of English at California State University. To learn more about her you are invited to visit her webpage at: http://www.marymackey.com You can also find her on Facebook at
https://www.facebook.com/marymackeywriter?sk=info
For more biographical information about Mary Mackey, also see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mackey
