Merritt Tierce
American writer and activist
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Merritt Tierce is an American short story author, story editor, essayist, activist, and novelist.[1] Tierce was born in Texas and attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop, receiving her MFA in Fiction in 2011.[2] She previously taught at the University of Iowa.[3] She was a founding board member of the Texas Equal Access Fund and previously worked as Executive Director of the TEA.[4][5][6] She currently resides in Los Angeles and is a writer for Orange is the New Black.[7]
Awards and honors
- 2019 Whiting Award[8][9]
- 2015 PEN Literary Awards Finalist[10]
- 2015 Texas Institute of Letters Steven Turner Award for First Fiction[11]
- 2013 National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 Honoree[12]
- 2011 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award[13]
Residencies
- 2017 MacDowell Colony Fellowship[14]
- 2017 Willapa Bay Artist-in-Residence[15]
- Can Cab Residency[16]
Bibliography
Novels
- Love Me Back. Doubleday Books. 2014. ISBN 978-0-3458-0713-7.
Short stories
- "Casa Linda." D Magazine. 2017.
- "Calvin D. Colson."[17] PEN America #19: Hauntings. 2016.
- "Solitaire." Oxford American. 2014.
- "Everything I Did in Madrid." H.O.W. Journal. 2014.
- "Suck It." Southwest Review and New Stories from the South: The Year's Best. 2008.
Essays
- "The Abortion I Didn't Have." The New York Times Magazine. 2021.
- "Distributed Denial of Service." Granta. 2019.
- "Author Merritt Tierce's Brief Stint as a Mailman." D Magazine. 2017.
- "What to Read If You Care About Access to Abortion in Trump's America." LitHub. 2017.
- "At Sea." The Paris Review. 2016.
- "I Published My Debut Novel to Critical Acclaim--And Then I Promptly Went Broke." Marie Claire. 2016.
- "Why I'm Still Infuriated About Abortion Access in Texas." Cosmopolitan. 2016.
- "This is What an Abortion Looks Like." The New York Times. 2014.
- "World Cup." Electric Lit. 2014.
Other work
Tierce was a writer for seasons six and seven of Orange is the New Black.[18]
Early life and education
Tierce grew up in Texas in a strongly Christian household.[18] She graduated from Abilene Christian University at 1997[19] with a Bachelors degree, age 19, having started college two years early.[18] Slated to start a graduate program at Yale School of Divinity the next year, her plans changed due to a pregnancy and ensuing marriage to the father of her unborn child, an event she sardonically described as a child bride in a shotgun wedding.[18] (She never went to Yale, but earned a Masters of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers Workshop[20] about fifteen years later.)[18]
Tierce was unable to consider abortion due to her religious beliefs at the time (she had written and presented against it while unknowingly pregnant).[18] She also couldn't consider giving up her first child to adoption,
The couple had a second child, a daughter, about a year later.[19] They eventually divorced, continued an amicable co-parenting.[18] Tierce remarried around age 36, and has a stepdaughter.[19]