Mary Carroll-Hackett

Mary Carroll-Hackett earned Bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy and Anthropology and a Master’s of Arts in English/Creative Writing from East Carolina University, then went on to earn an MFA in Literature and Writing from Bennington College. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in more than a hundred journals including Carolina Quarterly, Clackamas Literary Review, Pedestal Magazine, The Potomac, Reed, Superstition Review, Drunken Boat and The Prose-Poem Project, among others.

Her awards include being named a North Carolina Blumenthal Writer and winner of the Willamette Award for Fiction. Her scripts have won or placed in numerous competitions, including Best Screenplay at Moondance, the Great Lakes Film Festival, Beaufort Film Festival, American Gem, Gimme Credit, the Page Awards, and Wildsound. The National Center for Film in Toronto staged a reading of her script OBX in 2008. She had an O Henry Recommended recognition for her story “Placing.”

Her first chapbook, Three, was released in 2004, and her first collection of stories, What the Potter Said, in July 2005. The Real Politics of Lipstick was named winner of the 2010 annual poetry competition by Slipstream. A chapbook, Animal Soul,was released in 2012 from Kattywompus Press, and a full-length collection, If We Could Know Our Bones, by A-Minor Press in January 2014. Another chapbook, Trailer Park Oracle, is forthcoming from Aldrich Press in November 2015. Her most recent full collection, The Night I Heard Everything, is available now from FutureCycle Press.

Mary founded and for ten years edited The Dos Passos Review, Briery Creek Press, and The Liam Rector First Book Prize for Poetry. She also co-founded and launched SPACES, an innovative online magazine of art and literature, and regularly teaches workshops and seminars on Writing Through the Chakras, Writing the Spiritual Life, Writing the Body, and Writing the Mother, Mothering the Writer.

She has taught writing for twenty years, and in 2003, founded the Creative Writing programs, undergraduate and graduate, at Longwood University in Farmville, VA, serving as Program Director of those programs until Fall 2011. Most recently, she joined the low-residency faculty for the MFA program at West Virginia Wesleyan.

Mary is currently at work on a memoir.