Merritt Tierce

Merritt Tierce is an American short story author, story editor, essayist, activist, and novelist.^[1] Tierce was born in Texas and attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop, receiving her MFA in Fiction in 2011.^[2] She previously taught at the University of Iowa.^[3] She was a founding board member of the Texas Equal Access Fund and previously worked as Executive Director of the TEA.^[4][5][6] She currently resides in Los Angeles and is a writer for Orange is the New Black.^[7]

Awards and honors

• 2019 Whiting Award^[8][9]
• 2015 PEN Literary Awards Finalist^[10]
• 2015 Texas Institute of Letters Steven Turner Award for First Fiction^[11]
• 2013 National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 Honoree^[12]
• 2011 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award^[13]

Residencies

• 2017 MacDowell Colony Fellowship^[14]
• 2017 Willapa Bay Artist-in-Residence^[15]
• Can Cab Residency^[16]

Bibliography

Novels

• Love Me Back. Doubleday Books. 2014. ISBN 978-0-3458-0713-7.

Short stories

• "Casa Linda." D Magazine. 2017.
• "Calvin D. Colson."^[17] PEN America #19: Hauntings. 2016.
• "Solitaire." Oxford American. 2014.
• "Everything I Did in Madrid." H.O.W. Journal. 2014.
• "Suck It." Southwest Review and New Stories from the South: The Year's Best. 2008.

Essays

• "The Abortion I Didn't Have." The New York Times Magazine. 2021.
• "Distributed Denial of Service." Granta. 2019.
• "Author Merritt Tierce's Brief Stint as a Mailman." D Magazine. 2017.
• "What to Read If You Care About Access to Abortion in Trump's America." LitHub. 2017.
• "At Sea." The Paris Review. 2016.
• "I Published My Debut Novel to Critical Acclaim--And Then I Promptly Went Broke." Marie Claire. 2016.
• "Why I'm Still Infuriated About Abortion Access in Texas." Cosmopolitan. 2016.
• "This is What an Abortion Looks Like." The New York Times. 2014.
• "World Cup." Electric Lit. 2014.

Other work

Tierce was a writer for seasons six and seven of Orange is the New Black.^[18]

Early life and education

Tierce grew up in Texas in a strongly Christian household.^[18] She graduated from Abilene Christian University at 1997^[19] with a Bachelors degree, age 19, having started college two years early.^[18] Slated to start a graduate program at Yale School of Divinity the next year, her plans changed due to a pregnancy and ensuing marriage to the father of her unborn child, an event she sardonically described as a child bride in a shotgun wedding.^[18] (She never went to Yale, but earned a Masters of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers Workshop^[20] about fifteen years later.)^[18]

Tierce was unable to consider abortion due to her religious beliefs at the time (she had written and presented against it while unknowingly pregnant).^[18] She also couldn't consider giving up her first child to adoption,

The couple had a second child, a daughter, about a year later.^[19] They eventually divorced, continued an amicable co-parenting.^[18] Tierce remarried around age 36, and has a stepdaughter.^[19]