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 Travelers With No Ticket Home and Sugar Zone (Marsh Hawk Press 2011) 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 & Assocites, 2016), the 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 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 nobrld 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 a 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.
Mary Mackey’s 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
Works

Travelers With No Ticket Home
Mary Mackey's seventh collection of poetry intertwines English and Portuguese in a lyrical, visionary meditation on nature, childhood, the destruction of the rainforests of the Amazon, and the real and psychological landscape of travel. Mackey also touches on the broader human feelings of wonder, displacement, and confusion in these powerfully haunted poems full of the vitality and reality of the jungle.
Awards and Recognition
- PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Sugar Zone, 2012 Finalist for Northern California Book Reviewers Award, 2012