Mary Cecelia Allen
American memoirist

Mary Allen is an author and writing coach living in Iowa City, Iowa. She is an MFA graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and published her first memoir, The Rooms of Heaven, in 2000. She received an NEA fellowship in 2002.
Personal life
Allen was born in Northampton, Massachusetts. Because her mother had postpartum mental illness, she grew up in the home of a foster family in Westhampton, Massachusetts. She received a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Massachusetts in 1976. She worked in publishing in Boston, at Little, Brown and Company, in the 1970s and '80s, then moved to Iowa City in 1986 to attend the Iowa Writers' Workshop and received an MFA in 1988. She has taught in the Nonfiction Writing Program at The University of Iowa. She makes a living as a writing coach. She has a blog called Harnessing Time, about making peace with time and learning how to use it as an asset instead of fighting with it like an enemy.
“Mary Cecelia Allen” enters the record as american memoirist. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Mary, Cecelia and Allen can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mary Cecelia Allen” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.