Mary Wagner’s fiction has received an O. Henry Award and Pushcart Prize, and her first published poem won first place in the San Francisco Bay Guardian Poetry Contest. Her writing has appeared in Strange Attraction: The Best of Ten Years of ZYZZYVA, Love Stories for the Rest of Us (Pushcart Press), Lovers: Stories by Women (Crossing Press), Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Cream City Review, Crab Orchard Review, Spoon River Quarterly, The Southern Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Story Quarterly. Her plays have been workshopped or produced at the Drama League and Samuel French Annual Short Play Festival in New York, Louisville’s Humana Festival, and San Francisco’s Eureka Theatre, Best of Playground Festival, and the Exploratorium Museum (in collaboration with The Magic Theater).
She has taught self-defense to teenage girls and creative writing to prison paroles and at San Francisco State University. She was born in Louisville, Kentucky.