Mary Mackey

Mary Mackey is the bestselling author of thirteen novels and six collections of poetry. Her novels have appeared on The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller Lists and been translated into twelve foreign languages including Japanese, Hebrew, Greek, Russian, and Finnish. Mackey admires women who are willing to fight for what they believe in. Almost without exception, her heroines plunge passionately into life, searching for love and happiness, defending the earth, and seeking a moral center in difficult times. As Mackey has often observed: "I believe when you get old, it's better to regret what you did than what you didn't do."

Mackey's poems have been widely praised for their power, lyricism, and originality. "Sugar Zone," her most recent collection, won the 2012 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence, and Garrison Keillor has frequently featured her poems on The Writer's Almanac. Besides being a novelist and poet, Mackey is also a screenwriter and 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."

Related through her father's family to Mark Twain, Mackey graduated from Harvard and received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan. Because of her interest in different cultures, Mackey's novels deal with a wide range of subjects. Her three bestselling novels about the Goddess-worshipping cultures of Old Europe show her interest in ecology, nature-worship, and the preservation of the planet ("The Year The Horses Came," "The Horses At The Gate," and "The Fires of Spring).

She loves theater and dance and has written novels about three generations of women involved in ballet ("A Grand Passion") and three generations of women involved in the German theater during the rise of Hitler ("The Kindness of Strangers,"). Two of her novels have dealt with women who fought in the American Civil War ("The Notorious Mrs. Winston" and "The Widow's War").

She has also written about political unrest in the United States in the 1960's ( "Season of Shadows"), the last Goddess-worshipping cultures of ancient Sumer ("The Last Warrior Queen"), a comic romp through the 50's written in what she calls "the first person insane" ("McCarthy's List"), a movie star and a community college teacher who change places ("The Stand In), and a woman who starts a revenge consulting service ("Sweet Revenge"). Her first novel "Immersion" was set in the rainforests of Costa Rica before many of the trees were cut down. She also occasionally writes comic novels under the pen name "Kate Clemens."

During her twenties, Mackey lived in the rain forests of Costa Rica. For over two decades, she has been traveling to Brazil with her husband, incorporating her experiences into her fiction and poetry. Four of her novels ("The Year The Horses Came," "The Horses At The Gate," "The Fires of Spring" and "The Widow's War") describe some of the rituals of the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé. In 2005 she took a boat up a tributary of the Amazon, traveling over two thousand miles through flooded jungle. Recently, she made another trip to one of the headwaters of the Amazon on the Rio Tocantins. 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
Like her on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/marymackeywriter?sk=info
Follow her on Twitter at @Mary_Mackey
For more biographical information about her, also see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mackey
For information about her comic "Kate Clemens" novels see https://www.amazon.com/author/kateclemens