Mary Mackey

Mary Mackey is a bestselling author who has written six volumes of poetry including Sugar Zone winner of the 2012 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence. She is also the author of thirteen  novels some of which have appeared on The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle BestsellerLists. Mackeys novels have been translated into twelve languages including Japanese, Russian, Hebrew, Greek, and Finnish.

 Her poems have been praised by Wendell Berry, Jane Hirshfield, Marge Piercy, and Dennis Nurkse for their beauty, precision, originality, and extraordinary range. Garrison Keillor has featured her poetry four times on The Writers Almanac. Also a screenwriter, she has sold feature-length scripts to Warner Brothers as well as to independent film companies. Mackey sometimes writes comedy under her pen name Kate Clemens. She has a B.A. from Harvard College and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from The University of Michigan and is related through her fathers family to Mark Twain. At present, she lives in northern California with her husband Angus Wright.