In an opening note to this useful site, Piercy writes that she hopes her homepage will "help students writing papers, faculty doing research, people wanting to study me in a workshop setting, and just plain fans."

BIOGRAPHY
Marge Piercy (b. 1936). Born in Detroit, Marge Piercy was the first of her family to attend college. In 1957, she graduated from the University of Michigan (where she won prizes for poetry and fiction) and earned an M.A. from Northwestern University (1958). She was active in social and political causes and fought for equal treatment of women and minorities while opposing the Vietnam War. She supported herself with odd jobs in Chicago as she pursued a writing career, but her first novel was not published until after her 1969 move to Wellfleet, Massachusetts (where she still lives).

She is an extraordinarily prolific writer. Among her more than a dozen novels are He, She and It (1991), The Longings of Women (1994), and City of Darkness, City of Lights (1996). Her many volumes of poetry include My Mother's Body (1985), Available Light (1988), The Earth Shines Secretly: A Book of Days (1990), and Mars and Her Children (1992). She has also written plays, several volumes of nonfiction, and has edited the anthology Early Ripening: American Women's Poetry Now (1987). Most recently, she has published a collection of poetry, What Are Big Girls Made Of? (1997).

In the introduction to a volume of selected poems, Circles on the Water (1982), Piercy asserted that she wanted her poems to be "useful." "What I mean by useful is simply that readers will find poems that speak to and for them, will take those poems into their lives and say them to each other and put them up on the bathroom wall and remember bits and pieces of them in stressful or quiet moments....To find ourselves spoken for in art gives dignity to our pain, our anger, our lust, our losses."