Mary Mackey received a BA in English Literature from Harvard and a PhD in Comparative Literature from The University of Michigan. Her first novel, Immersion (Shameless Hussy Press, 1972), is believed to be the first feminist novel published by a Second Wave American feminist press. It is set in the rain forests of Costa Rica and takes as its subjects ecology and feminism. She is also the author of the novel A Grand Passion, which made both The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle bestseller lists. Mary Mackey’s twelve other novels include her bestselling Earthsong Trilogy (The Year The Horses Came, The Horses at the Gate, and The Fires of Spring), which reviewers have have compared to Clan of the Cave Bear; The Village of Bones, which won a CIIS Women’s Spirituality Book Award; and two novels about the American Civil War: The Notorious Mrs. Winston, and The Widow’s War. Mackey’s novels have been praised by Maxine Hong Kingston, Marge Piercy, Marija Gimbutas, Anne Tolstoi Wallach, Pat Conroy, Thomas Moore, Tillie Olsen, Diane Keaton, and Ursula LeGuin as well as by Publishers Weekly for their storytelling power; dramatic, compelling plots; bountiful array of vibrant characters; meticulous historical research; originality, vision, and extraordinary range. In 2026 and 2027, Open Road Media will reprint five of her novels including the entire Earthsong Series plus Season of Shadows, a novel, set in the 1960’s taking as its subject the America Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam Anti-War Protests, and the Weather Underground.

Mackey is also the author of nine collections of poetry including Sugar Zone, winner of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature and also Finalist for the Northern California Book Awards; and The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams (Marsh Hawk Press),which won the 2019 Eric Hoffer Award for the Best Book in the United States Published by a Small Press. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines, journals, and anthologies; been featured on The Writers Almanac and been praised by Wendell Berry, Eugene Redmond, Jane Hirshfield, D. Nurkse, Maxine Hong Kingston, Rafael Jesús González, Annie Finch, Judy Grahn, Lucille Lang Day, Al Young, and Marge Piercy for their beauty, precision, depth, lyricism, compassion, and awareness of environmental issues.

In Fall 2026, Women’s Spirituality Studies Press will publish The Goddess of Burning Hair, the first complete collection of her goddess poems written from 1972 to 2025 taking as their subject goddesses from Europe such as Medusa and Aphrodite; Afro-Brazilian goddesses like Iemanjá and Yansã; goddesses Mackey has invented like The Goddess of Burning Hair; goddesses who have created themselves, and goddesses who are a combination of the research of scholars like Marija Gimbutas and Mackey’s own imagination taken from her four novels about the goddess-worshipping/Earth-centered cultures of Neolithic Europe.

Mackey is a screenwriter and writer of nonfiction as well as a poet and novelist. In 2022, her screenplay Time Piecewon first prize in the City of Angels Women’s Film Festival. Her nonfiction book Creativity: Where Poems Begin(Marsh Hawk Press) was a 2023 Northern California Book Reviewers Award finalist for Best Book of Creative Nonfiction Published in Northern California

Mackey’s works have been translated into twelve languages including Japanese, Russian, Greek, and Finnish. She is past president of the West Coast branch of PEN; a Fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; and a member of the National Book Critics Circle, The Women’s National Book Association, The Writers Guild of America West, and SOLCHA (La Sociedad Latinoamericana y Caribeña de Historia Ambiental/The Latin American and Caribbean Society of Environmental History).Professor Emeritus of English at California State University, Sacramento, she was one of the founders of the CSUS Women’s Studies Program and the graduate and undergraduate Creative Writing programs.

Mary Mackey’s literary papers are archived in the Sophia Smith Special Collections Library, Smith College, Northampton, MA. Her collection of rare editions of small press poetry books is archived in the Smith College Mortimer Rare Book Collection.

To learn more about her, you are invited to visit her website at www.marymackey.com.

You can also follow her on BlueSky at @marymackeyauthor.bsky.social.

on X at @MMackeyAuthor and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/marymackeywriter.  Her books are available at amazon.com and elsewhere in hard copy as well as in e-book and Audible editions.