Related through her father's family to Mark Twain, she lived in the rain forests of Costa Rica in her early twenties. Recently, she has been traveling to Brazil and incorporating her experiences into her fiction and poetry. Four of her novels (The Widow’s War, The Year The Horses Came, The Horses At The Gate, and The Fires of Spring) include some of the rituals of the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé. In 2005 she took a boat up the Rio Negro, a tributary of the Amazon, travelling over two thousand miles through flooded jungle. In June 2009, she made another trip to one of the headwaters of the Amazon on the Rio Tocantins

Her works have appeared on the New York Times Bestseller List and been translated into eleven foreign languages including Japanese, Hebrew, Greek, and Finnish. A screenwriter as well as a novelist and poet, she has sold feature-length screenplays to Warner Brothers as well as to independent film companies. John Korty directed the filming of her original award-winning screenplay Silence. The film rights to her comic novel The Stand-In were recently optioned by director Renée De Palma of OneMotion Pictures. Twice, her poetry has been featured on Garrison Keeler’s Writer’s Almanac. At present, she lives in northern California with her husband Angus Wright, and is Professor Emeritus of English at California State University. To learn more about her you are invited to visit her webpage at: www.marymackey.com.