Mary McMyne was raised on the outskirts of Baton Rouge, Louisiana by ex-hippie parents who introduced her to Thoreau and Lewis Carroll and Frank Zappa at an impressionable age. Her mother sewed and sang and grew flowers and vegetables. Her father read voraciously and told evasive stories about Woodstock. (“If you remember it,” he once said, “you didn’t deserve to be there.”) They sent her to traditional Chinese art lessons and kept her in notebooks, which she filled with soap operas about parallel worlds and cardboard-box spaceships, and poems about dragons and comets. 


Flash forward two decades, and she has a Master of Fine Arts in fiction from New York University and Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in creative writing from Louisiana State University. She is finishing a novel reimagining the Odysseus myth during the Vietnam War from the wife's perspective. This novel, currently entitled WAIT, earned her the 2007 Faulkner Society's Novel-in-Progress Award. She had another project short-listed for the Faulkner Novel Award the same year, and won the Tony Bill Screenwriting Award in 2002 and the Robert Olen Butler Short Story Award in 2001. Her fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and photography has been published or will soon appear in Double Dealer, New Delta Review, Exquisite Corpse: A Journal of Letters and Life, Country Roads, and Web Del Sol. She is also a contributor to The Nervous Breakdown.