Mary's profile
Mary Clark grew up in Baltimore and after many years of living in Massachusetts, returned to her roots to write novels. She earned an MFA in Poetry from The University of Iowa. Her poems and stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Fiction, The Iowa Review, New England Review, Crazyhorse, and in J Journal: New Writing on Justice. She is honored to win the 2021 Crazyhorse Fiction Prize, selected by Rumaan Alam, a writer who goes toward the difficult. She pulled almost all of her prizewinning story, “Steppie” from a chapter in her recent novel manuscript.
A Baltimore City native, a fifth-generation Baltimorean, Mary had the great privilege to attend Western High School, and is shaped by the teachers and young women from that formative experience. After graduate school, she returned to the city and taught writing in the area for five years before moving to Massachusetts for an employment opportunity. While working as a professional writer for corporations, she continued her fiction and poetry, waking early to write for a few hours before rushing to work.
At last, in 2018, Mary stopped writing for corporations, stopped cutting-short her own writing, stopped fitting it in around her day‑job, and returned to Baltimore. She missed her northern-most‑southern roots and the diverse voices resonating everywhere, from the culture to the yoga studio. She now lives in Mount Vernon, where she works exclusively on her art.
Mary learned how to write novels by writing novels. She brings her poetry training to her prose. Her novels are lyrically voiced, big stories, with high stakes and love affairs at their core. The long form allows for the scope to include the social culture surrounding characters, widening the frame, and inviting readers to struggle with the messiness of life.
