Mary Allen is the author of a literary memoir, The Rooms of Heaven, published by Alfred A. Knopf and Vintage Books, and a collection of personal essays, The Deep Limitless Air, published by Blue Light Press. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship and has published short work on the Psychology Today website and in MAYDAY, Panorama, Poets and Writers, Tiferet, Real Simple, Library Journal, The Chaos, CNN Online, and in the anthology If I Don’t Make It, I Love You: Survivors in the Aftermath of School Shootings. She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has taught in the University of Iowa’s nonfiction writing MFA program and the Iowa Summer Writing Festival at the University of Iowa. She currently makes a living as a writing coach and lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
Mary Allen’s themes are spiritual and psychological healing, love, the nature of life and death, and the ways our states of consciousness intersect with our experience of reality. Her writing — and broad range of writing topics — reflect her belief that the personal and the practical, the painful and the numinous, the spiritual and the ordinary are all blended together in our lives and cannot be separated from one another without at least part of the truth being lost.
Click here to watch a 2026 interview with Mary Allen, offered by the University of Iowa Iowa Writes program.
Click here to read a piece by Mary Allen called ‘Life, Death, Neighbors, Houses,’ which was a runner-up in the journal MAYDAY’s nonfiction essay contest.
Click here to read Mary Allen’s essay ‘Out West,’ about traveling in the American West, which was published in Panorama: A Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature.
Mary Allen has been featured on Largehearted Boy, a website and blog that combines writing and music in uniquely interesting ways. Authors create playlists of songs that resonate with their writing and write ‘book notes’ describing how the music connects to their writing. Click here to visit the site and read Mary’s book notes.
Click here to read Mary Allen’s essay about the shootings in the Physics Department at the University of Iowa, published in the Little Village on the thirtieth anniversary of the shootings.
Click Here to read an award-winning essay, At the Monastery, by Mary Allen, which won first prize in Tiferet Magazine’s spiritual writing contest in 2013. Another essay by Mary Allen, The Deep Limitless Air, was one of two finalists in Tiferet’s spiritual writing contest in 2019.
Visit CNN Online for a piece by Mary Allen on being the daughter of a mother with maternal mental illness.