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Mary Cecelia Allen

American memoirist

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 6, 2026
Entity authorityQ24049167 ↗
Source-derived summary

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.

Editorial summary

“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.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2000, 2002, 1976, 1986—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Mary, Cecelia and Allen.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Mary Cecelia Allen” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Mary, Cecelia and Allen provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q24049167. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2000, 2002, 1976 and 1986.

Critical limits

Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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  2. Expand the search: follow Mary Cecelia Allen primary sources, Mary Cecelia Allen archive and Mary research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

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Source & attribution

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.