Tamora Pierce Papers

Tamora Pierce was born in South Connellsville, Pennsylvania on Dec 13, 1954.  At the hospital her name was misspelled on her birth certificate which resulted in her being named ‘Tamora’ instead of ‘Tamara’.  While growing up her mother was going to college to pursue a B.A. in English, which was unheard of at the time, and her Uncle gave her many books that she treasured.   These two forces in her life most likely led her into being a woman who had strong feminist ideas as well as being a writer throughout her life.  In June 1963, she and her sisters were moved to California when her father was transferred.  After being introduced to Lord of the Rings by a teacher, she began to write about fantasy and science fiction, with young women as the lead characters.  In 1969, her parents divorced and she, along with her sisters, moved back to Pennsylvania with their mother.  She later applied to Pennsylvania University seeking a psych/social worker degree, after being discouraged that she would not be able to write her stories the way she wanted to and make a living off of them.  In the summer before her junior year at Penn, she wrote her first complete short story since high school and a year following that she sold her first short story.  Encouraged, she later wrote her first complete novel and graduated with a B.A. of Arts from Penn.  She moved to Manhattan and worked for a literary agency, which would later publish her novel.  That novel, The Song of the Lioness, was split into four separate parts with the first story being Alanna: The 1^st Adventure, which was released in 1983 by Atheneum.  Her books gained popularity in the 1990s and she started to go to sci-fi conventions in 1997.  Her book Melting Stones made history as being the first novel release as an audio book first in 2007,with a full cast, and then in print (2008).  Pierce lives with her husband Tim Liebe in New York.  For more information about Mrs. Pierce’s books and life, visit her website at www.tamora-pierce.com

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