Mary Clark

Mary Clark lived and worked in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of New York City for more than two decades. In her book, Into The Fire: A Poet's Journey through Hell's Kitchen, she celebrates the poets and the neighborhood of the late 1970s and early 1980s. For some years afterward, she worked for community organizations. In 1993 she started a community newspaper, combining her two loves: the neighborhood and writing.

Her memoir, Community: Journal of Power Politics and Democracy in Hell's Kitchen, focuses on community activism and city politics in the 1980s and 1990s. Another memoir, Tally: An Intuitive Life (All Things That Matter Press), is the story of her friendship and "word work" with an elderly Bohemian artist and self-styled philosopher in NYC's Greenwich Village, a relationship that ultimately transcends time.

A short novel, Covenant: Growing Up in Florida's Lost Paradise, blends harsh reality with children's dreams. The poetry novel, Children of Light (Ten Penny Players' BardPress) follows children's adventures in a tropical landscape as they journey toward maturity and freedom. Two novels, The Horizon Seekers and Racing The Sun, feature a female teacher in South Miami who works with people with disabilities, has unexplained trauma in her past, and a crew of diverse friends; she travels to South Africa where she learns of new ways to view disability, and also travels to the future and back, seamlessly, as she seeks to make her visions real.