Mary Mackey received a BA from Harvard and a PhD in Comparative Literature from The University of Michigan. Her published works include eight collections of poetry, four from Marsh Hawk Press--THE JAGUARS THAT PROWL OUR DREAMS: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS 1974 TO 2018 (2018), winner of the 2019 Eric Hoffer Prize for the Best Book Published by a Small Press; TRAVELERS WITH NO TICKET HOME (2014); SUGAR ZONE (2011); and BREAKING THE FEVER (2006)--and fourteen novels, one of which made The New York Times Bestseller list. She is the winner of the 2012 Oakland PEN Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence. Featured four times on The Writer's Almanac, her poems have been praised by Maxine Hong Kingston, Wendell Berry, Jane Hirsfield, D. Nurkse, Ron Hansen, Dennis Schmitz, and Marge Piercy for their beauty, precision, originality, and extraordinary range. Mackey's works have been translated into twelve foreign languages including Japanese, Hebrew, Greek, Russian, and Finnish. A co-founder of the Feminist Writers Guild with Adrienne Rich and Susan Griffin, and co- founder of the California State University Sacramento Creative Writing Program, she is past president of the West Coast branch of PEN, a Fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, a member of the National Book Critics Circle, and Professor Emeritus of English at CSUS. For over twenty-five years, she has been traveling to Brazil with her husband, Angus Wright, who writes about land reform and environmental issues. Her literary papers are archived in the Sophia Smith Special Collections Library, Northampton, MA. Her collection of rare editions of small press poetry books authored by Northern California poets is archived in the Smith College Mortimer Rare Book Collection.
