Biography

As the red-haired, blue-eyed daughter of Irish-German Catholic parents, Mary Kirk made a rather dramatic entrance into life, teaching her parents, who were forty-three and fifty-two at the time, a whole new meaning to the term "starting over." "My brothers were 17, 23, and 25. I became an aunt at three weeks of age and collected a total of twelve nieces and nephews by the time I was eleven."

Mary was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. She studied piano for fourteen years, and she earned a degree in American Studies and History. Her creative energies found their focus, though, when she began penning fiction.

Mary has received much acclaim for her work from both readers and reviewers. Several of her books have appeared on bestseller lists, and many have been nominated for awards. Phoenix Rising (Silhouette Special Edition, 1988) won Romantic Times Reviewer's Choice Award for Best Silhouette Special Edition. Miracles (Silhouette Special Edition, 1990) won RT's Reviewer's Choice Award for Best Series Romance and was a Romance Writer's of America Rita finalist. Embers (Silhouette Special Edition, 1991) won a Lifetime Achievement Award from RT for Most Innovative Romance.

Mary says she writes novels that reflect her "profound respect for the capacity of the human spirit to survive and flourish. I'm a determinedly positive person, which means I'm committed to happy endings. Reality offers enough places a person can look if they want to be jolted or upset. When I read, I want to be entertained, and, by the last page of a book, I want to feel uplifted. When I write, I want to create a vision of what might be possible. Intimacy, honesty, love—the stuff romances are made of—aren't fantasies to me. They're goals, things to reach for, to work toward.

"People who say women read romances for escape and fantasy are over-simplifying. All fiction is fantasy and, in a sense, escape. Critics pick on romance as being especially fantastical, saying that love is never that perfect or no man could be that wonderful. It's important to me that my characters, their relationships and their problems, be as real as I can make them, because I don't believe romance readers really want to read about something they have absolutely no hope of ever having. If they were that interested in pure fantasy, they'd be reading science fiction—and editors wouldn't think it was so important for the heroine of a romance to be someone with whom the reader can readily identify. I think women want to believe they can have their life and their relationships be as good as those in the pages of the best romance novels. I want to believe that—and I can't believe I'm that different from other women."

Mary and her husband have been married twenty-two years, and they have two sons.