Biography

Mackey was born in Indianapolis, Indiana. Her father was a physician. Her mother worked as a chemist in the Mead Johnson

Mead Johnson

Mead Johnson & Company is a company which was majority owned by Bristol-Myers Squibb after an acquisition in 1967, but was spun off in 2009 as an independent firm. Mead Johnson is a major manufacturer of infant formula both domestically and globally with its flagship product Enfamil...

 laboratories during World War II. While attending Harvard College

Harvard College

Harvard College, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of two schools within Harvard University granting undergraduate degrees...

, Mackey, an English major, came under the influence of the father of modern ethnobotany

Ethnobotany

Ethnobotany is the scientific study of the relationships that exist between people and plants....

, Richard Evans Schultes

Richard Evans Schultes

Richard Evans Schultes may be considered the father of modern ethnobotany, for his studies of indigenous peoples' uses of plants, including especially entheogenic or hallucinogenic plants , for his lifelong collaborations with chemists, and...

 to whom she attributes a life-long interest in botany and ecology, themes which often appear in her novels and poetry. During her twenties, she lived in field stations in the then-remote jungles of Costa Rica. After receiving her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan, she moved to California to become Professor of English and Writer-in-Residence at California State University, Sacramento

California State University, Sacramento

California State University, Sacramento, popularly known as Sacramento State, is a public university located in the city of Sacramento, California. It is part of the California State University system...

 (CSUS). She is married to Angus Wright

Angus Wright

Angus Wright is professor emeritus and one of the founders of the Environmental Studies program at California State University, Sacramento, where he taught from 1972–2005. Wright earned his Ph.D...

, CSUS Emeritus Professor of Environmental Studies, with whom she frequently travels to Brazil.

Mackey was one of the founders of the CSUS Women’s Studies Program. She also founded the CSUS English Department Graduate Creative Writing Program along with poet Dennis Schmitz

Dennis Schmitz

-Life:He grew up in Dubuque, Iowa. He graduated from Loras College and the University of Chicago. He married Loretta D'Agostino in 1960. He taught at Illinois Institute of Technology, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and California State University, Sacramento.His students include Raymond...

 and novelist Richard Bankowsky. In 1978 Mackey founded the Feminist Writers Guild with poets Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Cecile Rich is an American poet, essayist and feminist. She has been called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century."-Early life:...

 and Susan Griffin

Susan Griffin

Susan Griffin is an eco-feminist author. She describes her work as "draw[ing] connections between the destruction of nature, the diminishment of women and racism, and trac[ing] the causes of war to denial in both private and public life." She received a MacArthur grant for Peace and International...

 and novelist Valerie Miner

Valerie Miner

Valerie Miner is an American novelist, journalist, and professor.-Biography:Valerie Miner is the award-winning author of thirteen books. Her novels include After Eden, Range of Light, A Walking Fire, Winter's Edge, Blood Sisters, All Good Women, Movement: A Novel in Stories, and Murder in the...

. From 1989-1992, Mackey served as President of the West Coast Branch of PEN American Center

PEN Center USA

PEN Center USA, founded in 1943, is one of two PEN centers in the United States and 145 centers in the world. It was incorporated as a non-profit organization in 1981...

 involving herself in PEN’s international defense of persecuted writers. Mackey retired from California State University in 2008. As of 2011, she continues to write novels and poetry.

Works

Mackey is the author of thirteen novels and six collections of poetry. She is noted for her historical fiction, particularly for The Year The Horses Came, The Horses At The Gate, and The Fires of Spring, a trilogy set in Neolithic Europe which Mackey based on the research of archaeologist Marija Gimbutas. She is also noted for her lyric poetry which has been praised by Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry is an American man of letters, academic, cultural and economic critic, and farmer. He is a prolific author of novels, short stories, poems, and essays...

, Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield is an American poet.-Biography:Jane Hirshfield was born in New York City and received her bachelor's degree from Princeton University in the school's first graduating class to include women. She later studied at the San Francisco Zen Center, including three years of monastic...

, Dennis Nurkse

Dennis Nurkse

-Life:Nurkse is the son of the eminent economist Ragnar Nurkse. He has taught workshops at Rikers Island, and his poems about prison life appeared in The American Poetry Review, Evergreen Review, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TriQuarterly, The Kenyon Review, and other magazines...

, Ron Hansen

Ron Hansen

Ron Hansen may refer to:*Ron Hansen , American novelist*Ron Hansen , Canadian politician*Ron Hansen , baseball player*Ron Hansen...

, Dennis Schmitz

Dennis Schmitz

-Life:He grew up in Dubuque, Iowa. He graduated from Loras College and the University of Chicago. He married Loretta D'Agostino in 1960. He taught at Illinois Institute of Technology, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and California State University, Sacramento.His students include Raymond...

, and Marge Piercy

Marge Piercy

Marge Piercy is an American poet, novelist, and social activist. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Gone to Soldiers, a sweeping historical novel set during World War II.-Biography:...

 for its beauty, precision, originality, and extraordinary range.

Her first novel, Immersion (Shameless Hussy Press, 1972) is set in the rain forests of Costa Rica. It takes as its subjects ecology and feminism, and is believed to be the first feminist novel published by a Second Wave American feminist press. McCarthy’s List is a comic novel set in Indianapolis in the 1950s. The Last Warrior Queen retells the myth of Inanna

Inanna

Inanna, also spelled Inana is the Sumerian goddess of sexual love, fertility, and warfare....

, the Sumerian goddess of sexual love, fertility, and warfare. A Grand Passion and The Kindness of Strangers are set in Europe and take as their subject three generations of women involved in the arts. Three of Mackey’s novels (The Year The Horses Came, The Horses At The Gate, and The Fires of Spring) comprise her Earthsong Trilogy. Set in Europe in the Neolithic

Neolithic

The Neolithic Age, Era, or Period, or New Stone Age, was a period in the development of human technology, beginning about 9500 BC in some parts of the Middle East, and later in other parts of the world. It is traditionally considered as the last part of the Stone Age...

 Period, they deal with struggles between matristic  earth-centered goddess-worshipping cultures and invading patriarchal nomads. Mackey’s Season of Shadows is set at Harvard in the late 60’s and deals with various political issues such as the Civil Rights Movement

Civil rights movement

The civil rights movement was a worldwide political movement for equality before the law occurring between approximately 1950 and 1980. In many situations it took the form of campaigns of civil resistance aimed at achieving change by nonviolent forms of resistance. In some situations it was...

 and protests against the United State’s involvement in the Vietnam War

Vietnam War

The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...

. In 2003 and 2004, in a departure from her previous styles and themes, Mackey chose to write The Stand-In and Sweet Revenge under the pen name “Kate Clemens.” Both are comic novels set in Los Angeles. Most recently she has written two Civil War novels, The Notorious Mrs. Winston and The Widow’s War, set in Indiana and Kansas respectively.

Mackey’s poetry is hard to classify. Critics have called it “fierce,” “surreal,” and “ecstatic,” “passionately transcendent,” and “corrosive,” and noted her “hallucinatory troping” which is “continually deconstructing rational consciousness.” In speaking of Mackey’s collection Breaking The Fever, poet Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield is an American poet.-Biography:Jane Hirshfield was born in New York City and received her bachelor's degree from Princeton University in the school's first graduating class to include women. She later studied at the San Francisco Zen Center, including three years of monastic...

 noted: “The poetry in Breaking the Fever offers truths both personal & political, visions both actual and imaginatively broad …, set down with a sensuous, compassionate, and utterly unflinching eye.” On several occasions, Garrison Keillor

Garrison Keillor

Gary Edward "Garrison" Keillor is an American author, storyteller, humorist, and radio personality. He is known as host of the Minnesota Public Radio show A Prairie Home Companion Gary Edward "Garrison" Keillor (born August 7, 1942) is an American author, storyteller, humorist, and radio...

has read Mackey’s poems on his daily on-line, radio, and podcast The Writer’s Almanac. In October 2011, Marsh Hawk Press published Mackey’s sixth collection of poetry, Sugar Zone. Mackey has said that the poems in Sugar Zone are inspired by the works of Brazilian novelists and poets, and that they “combine Portuguese and English as incantation to evoke the lyrical space that lies at the conjunction between the two languages.”

Novels

• Immersion, San Lorenzo, CA: Shameless Hussy Press (1972)
• McCarthy’s List, New York, NY: Doubleday (1979)
• The Last Warrior Queen, New York, NY: Putnam (1983)
• A Grand Passion, New York, NY: Simon & Schuster (1988)
• The Kindness of Strangers, New York, NY: Simon & Schuster (1988)
• Season of Shadows, New York, NY: Bantam Books (1991)
• The Year The Horses Came, San Francisco, CA: Harper San Francisco (1993)
• The Horses At The Gate, San Francisco, CA: Harper San Francisco (1996)
• The Fires of Spring, New York, NY: Penguin (1998)
• The Stand-In (under the pen name “Kate Clemens”), New York, NY: Kensington Books (2003)
• Sweet Revenge (under the pen name “Kate Clemens”), New York, NY: Kensington Books (2004)
• The Notorious Mrs. Winston, New York, NY: Berkley Books (2007)
• The Widow’s War, New York, NY: Berkley Books (2009)

Poetry collections

• Split Ends, Berkeley, CA: Ariel Press (1974)
• One Night Stand, Emeryville, CA: Effie’s Press (1976)
• Skin Deep, Washington, DC: Gallimaufry Press (1978)
• The Dear Dance of Eros, Seattle WA: Fjord Press (1987)
• Breaking The Fever, New York, NY: Marsh Hawk Press (2006)
• Sugar Zone, New York, NY: Marsh Hawk Press (2011)

Collected Other

• Silence (original screenplay). Film directed by John Korty (1974)
• McCarthy’s List (screenplay, adaptation of Mackey’s novel). Warner Brothers (1980)
• Good Behavior (original screenplay co-authored with Ray Fox), (1982)
• The Spy (original screenplay, short subject, co-authored with Renée de Palma). Film directed by de Palma (2000)
• The Time Piece (original screenplay, short subject, co-authored with Renée de Palma). Film in production (2011)

External links

• Mackey’s homepage http://www.marymackey.com/
• German Wikipedia page http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mackey
• Marsh Hawk Press homepage http://www.marshhawkpress.org/index.htm
• Mackey’s Author Page at amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/Mary-Mackey/e/B000APXUQ6/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0
• Garrison Keillor reading Mackey’s poetry:
• http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2007/02/15
• http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2007/02/16
• http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2011/02/21

• Mackey reading her poetry at Diesel Bookstore, July 22, 2009
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5FX3MEg0VA
• Andy Ross interviews Mackey about writing historical fiction
• http://www.redroom.com/blog/andyross/mary-mackey-writing-historical-fiction