Literature / Civil rights & activism
Marge Piercy
born 1936 · novelist, poet, activist
Feminist novelist and poet of Woman on the Edge of Time who grew up in working-class Detroit and returned to the city in her 2015 collection Made in Detroit.
- Born
Detroit, Michigan
age 90- Detroit years
- 1936–1953
01 / The Detroit story
The Detroit story
Piercy was born in Detroit during the Depression to a working-class family and was raised Jewish by her mother and her Orthodox Jewish grandmother. A childhood illness turned her into a voracious reader, and books opened horizons far beyond her neighborhood. She graduated from Mackenzie High School on the city's northwest side and became the first in her family to go to college, winning Hopwood Awards at the University of Michigan. She went on to write more than twenty novels, including the feminist utopia Woman on the Edge of Time and the cyberpunk He, She and It, and a long shelf of poetry rooted in her Jewish heritage and radical politics. Late in life she looked back at her hometown in the poetry collection Made in Detroit (2015).
Highlights
- Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), a classic of feminist science fiction
- Arthur C. Clarke Award (1993) for He, She and It
- Gone to Soldiers (1987), a New York Times bestseller about World War II
- Poetry collection Made in Detroit (2015)
- Mackenzie High School graduate; first in her family to attend college
02 / Their Detroit places
Their Detroit places 1
Where they lived, worked, performed and liked to hang out. Closed and demolished places stay here too, because they are part of the city's history.
Studied here · early 1950s
Mackenzie High School
Demolished · 1928–2007
Her high school, decorated with Pewabic tile; it closed in 2007, was demolished in 2012 and replaced by a K-8 school that kept the Mackenzie name.