Mary Morris

Mary Morris is an American author of fiction and travel writing. Born in Chicago in 1947, she studied at Smith College and received her MA from Columbia University. She has taught creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College for many years. She is the author of more than a dozen novels, story collections, and travel memoirs. Morris's fiction often explores the lives of women navigating identity, family, and freedom across different cultures and geographies. Her novel The Jazz Palace (2015), set in early twentieth-century Chicago against the backdrop of the birth of jazz music, follows the intertwined lives of a Jewish family and a Black jazz musician. The Jazz Palace won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction in 2016 and was praised for its atmospheric evocation of Chicago, its attention to the racial dynamics of the jazz world, and its beautiful prose. Morris's other notable works include the travel memoir Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Travelling Alone (1988) and the novels Wall to Wall (1991), House Arrest (1997), and Gateway to the Moon (2018). She lives in New York City.