About
Mary Mackey is a New York Times best selling novelist and an award-winning poet. She has a B.A. from Harvard and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Among her published works are eight collections of poetry, including The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams (Marsh Hawk Press), winner of the 2019 Eric Hoffer Award for the best book published by a small press as well as a 2018 Women's Spirituality Book Award; and Sugar Zone (Marsh Hawk Press) winner of the 2012 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence and finalist for the 2012 Northern California Book Reviewers Award. She is also the author of fourteen novels including The Village of Bones (Lowenstein & Associates), a prequel to her Earthsong Series, which also includes novels The Year the Horses Came, The Horses at the Gate, and The Fires of Spring.
Mackey’s poems have been praised by Maxine Hong Kingston, Wendell Berry, Jane Hirshfield, D. Nurkse, Ron Hansen, Dennis Schmitz, Al Young, and Marge Piercy for their beauty, precision, originality, and extraordinary range. Garrison Keillor featured her poetry four times on The Writer’s Almanac. Mackey’s novels take on broad historical subjects with meticulous research. They have made 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 her fifteenth novel (as yet untitled) and new series of poems which combines Portuguese and English to evoke the lyrical space that lies at the conjunction of the two languages.
The Mary Mackey Papers are archived at the Sophia Smith Special Collections Library, Smith College, Northampton MA. You can learn more about her, read her blog interview series People Who Make Books Happen, and sample her work at http://marymackey.com You can also follow her on Twitter @MMackeyAuthor, connect with her on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/marymackeywriter, and subscribe to her quarterly Newsletter at http://eepurl.com/CrLHT
Other resources for biographical information about Mary Mackey include :
www.marshhawkpress.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mackey
http://www.amazon.com/Mary-Mackey/e/B000APXUQ6/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0
Featured Work
The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams: New and Selected Poems
"Mary Mackey's poems are powerful, beautiful, and have extraordinary range. This is the poetry of a woman who has lived richly and felt deeply. May her concern for the planet help save it." Maxine Hong Kingston
"Mary Mackey's eyes is drawn to the marginalized, the poor, the outcast, the trivialized, the ones who stand at the center of the human adventure. [In] The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams, Mary Mackey has created an oeuvre wilder, more open to change with each passing year. Hers is a monumental achievement."
D. Nurkse
Other Works
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The Village of Bones
2016
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Travelers With No Ticket Home
2014
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Sugar Zone
2011
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Breaking The Fever
2006
Awards and Recognition
- PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Sugar Zone, 2012 Finalist for Northern California Book Reviewers Award, 2012
- 2019 Eric Hoffer Small Press Award for best book published by a small press for The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams
- 2018 Women's Spirituality Book Award for The Village of Bones from the CIIS Department of Diversity and Inclusion
- 2018 Women's Spirituality Book Award for The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams from the CIIS Department of Diversity and Inclusion