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]

• 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]

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]