Mary Beth Keane was born in New York City and grew up in Rockland County, New York. She is the oldest of three sisters, and her parents are both from the west of Ireland. The town where she grew up has a large Irish immigrant community, and although Greta and Michael’s story is in no way autobiographical, it is this community that inspired certain aspects of The Walking People.
Mary Beth began writing fiction in grammar school and decided in sixth grade that she wanted to be a writer. She went to an all-girls Catholic high school in Bergen County, New Jersey. After high school, Mary Beth attended Barnard College. It was at Barnard that she began to write more seriously, and took Mary Gordon’s famous story writing workshop where she was introduced to the fiction of Alice Munro, William Trevor, Jean Stafford, and Katherine Anne Porter. She earned an M.F.A. in fiction from the University of Virginia in 2005.
Her short fiction has appeared in various newspapers and journals including The Chicago Tribune, The Antioch Review, The Baltimore Review, New York Stories, and The Recorder.
Since graduate school, Mary Beth has taught at James Madison University and Temple University. She, her husband, and their son now live in Old City, Philadelphia, where she is at work on her second novel.
