Marie Mutsuki Mockett's debut novel, Picking Bones from Ash, was published by Graywolf Press on October 1st, 2009 and has been shortlisted for the 2010 Saroyan Prize. Amy Tan has praised the novel as "a book of intelligence and heart," and in an early review, Publishers Weekly has declared, "In this ambitious debut ... Mockett succeeds where others fail: making the reader care."
Marie was born in Carmel, California to a Japanese mother and American father, who saw to it that she learned her mother's native tongue. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in East Asian Studies. Her work often focuses on the intersection between spirituality and materialism in Japan and the United States, two countries that have experienced unprecedented levels of wealth.
Marie's fiction, essays and poetry have been published in Agni, Epoch, South Dakota Review, New Delta Review, North Dakota Quarterly, The Portland Review, LIT, The Texas Review, Phoebe, and other journals. She has written about video games for The Millions and the discomfort of being a debut novelist (and being uninvited to read in New York) at The Nervous Breakdown. In 2009, Marie attended the Bread Loaf Conference in Ripton, Vermont, as a Bernard O'Keefe Scholar in Nonfiction.
Marie's essay "Letter from a Japanese Crematorium" was published in Agni 65 and cited as distinguished in the 2008 Best American Essays, edited by Adam Gopnik, and published in the Creative Nonfiction 3, edited by Lee Gutkind. Of the essay, Publishers Weekly wrote: "Among the standouts is . . . an emotional "Letter from a Japanese Crematorium" by Marie Mutsuki Mockett."
Marie resides in New York with her Scottish husband, her delightful son, and three precocious cats. She is represented by the Irene Skolnick Literary Agency. Visit the Picking Bones from Ash site.
