Mary Gordon is the author of ten works of fiction and non-fiction, most recently The Liar’s Wife, a collection of four novellas about the difficulty of acknowledging and moving on from the past, set largely between the eastern American coast and continental Europe. Among her other publications include the novels Final Payments, Pearl, and The Love of My Youth; the memoirs The Shadow Man and Circling My Mother; and The Stories of Mary Gordon, which was awarded the Story Prize. She has received numerous other honors, including a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Academy Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Born in Far Rockaway, Queens to an Italian-Irish mother, Anna Gagliano Gordon, and Jewish father, David, who converted to Catholicism as a young man, Gordon was raised Catholic, and seriously contemplated becoming a nun prior to discovering her inclinations towards creative writing at Barnard College and later in an M.F.A. program at Syracuse University.

Mary currently lives between Manhattan and Rhode Island with her husband, Arthur Cash, and their two dogs, Rhodo and Ponto.