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 SCIENCE magazine 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 space operas about parallel worlds and cardboard-box spaceships, and poems about dragons and comets. 

She has Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in creative writing from LSU, and an MFA from NYU in fiction. She recently completed the novel, WAIT., for which she won the 2007 Faulkner Society's Novel-in-Progress Award. She won the Tony Bill Screenwriting Award (2002), the Robert Olen Butler Short Story Award (2001), and has been short-listed for the Faulkner Novel Award (2007). Her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry has been published or is forthcoming in DOUBLE DEALER, NEW DELTA REVIEW, EXQUISITE CORPSE, COUNTRY ROADS, and WEB DEL SOL. She is also a contributor to THE NERVOUS BREAKDOWN.

During the last six years, she has taught writing at NYU, NJCU, and ASA CAP Columbia. She now teaches writing and literature in Lafayette,  where she lives in a hundred-year-old cypress cottage with her husband, their border collie, and two black cats. .