Marian Pierce has worked for Japan's National Public Radio, backpacked in the Himalayas, and traveled to India four times. She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1996, and her short stories have appeared in GQ magazine, Creative Writers' Handbook, Scribner's Best of the Fiction Workshops 1997, STORY, The Mississippi Review, Confrontation, and Puerto del Sol.
Marian won the Frederick Exley fiction competition, sponsored by GQ magazine, in 1995, a Michener fellowship from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1996, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship in 1997, a Literary Arts fellowship for fiction in 2004, and a KHN Center for the Arts fellowship, also in 2004. She was a 1999 Finalist for the Bakeless Literary Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2008 David Wong Fellowship at the University of East Anglia for an author writing a book of fiction set in the Far East.
Marian lived in Japan for almost 5 years in the 1980s, and many of the photos on this site are from a return visit she made in 2005. She now lives in Portland, Oregon, where she works as a freelance editor and teaches creative writing classes at Marylhurst University and online in the UCLA Extension Writers' Program. She is also a yoga teacher.