Mary Gaitskill was born in Lexington, KY and grew up in the Detroit area. She left home at the age of 16, eventually traveling to Canada where she lived illegally with a fake ID. At 19, she realized that if she wanted to become a writer she needed more education and so returned to America to attend community college. From there, she went to the University of Michigan where she received her B.A. and won a Hopwood Award. She then moved to New York City in 1981.
Gaitskill published her first book, a story collection titled Bad Behavior in 1988 and has since published two more story collections, Because They Wanted To (a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist) and Don't Cry; and three novels, Two Girls, Fat and Thin, Veronica (nominated for a National Book Award, was a National Book Critics Circle finalist, and was worked on at MacDowell in 2004), and The Mare, as well as a collection of essays titled Somebody With a Little Hammer. Her most recent book is a compilation of previous work with visual art titled The Devil’s Treasure: A Book of Stories and Dreams.
She taught writing at the university level between 1993 and 2022 and was the writer-in-residence at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She’s been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Cullman Library Fellowship, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters grant. She became an Academy member in 2019.
At MacDowell, Gaitskill has worked on novels, story collections, and in 2023, she worked on a fictional project commissioned by the Gagosian Art Gallery.
