Her roots are Jewish and Welsh. Piercy has written much about the significance of her Jewish roots, and her work is that of someone familiar with an intrinsically rich poetic tradition. The first person in her family to attend college, she was awarded a scholarship and received her A.B. in 1957 from the University of Michigan, where she won Hopwood Awards for poetry and fiction. She earned her M.A. from Northwestern University in 1958. Piercy received the Carolyn Kizer Poetry Prize in 1986 and 1990, the Golden Rose Poetry Prize in 1990, and the May Sarton Award in 1991. Other awards include a literature award from the Governor's Commission on the Status of Women (Massachusetts), two Borestone Mountain Poetry Awards, the Orion Scott Award in the Humanities, and a National Endowment for the Arts award in 1978. On 2 June 1982 she married the author Ira Wood, her third husband, with whom she makes her home in Wellfleet, Massachusetts.
Piercy's poetry collections show her idiosyncratic style, mature from the beginning of her publishing career, and the evolution of an original, strong voice. Because of the personal content, some readers might see the poems as autobiographical. They are, however, only autobiographical in the sense that Piercy takes incidents from her life and other lives that she observes, then infuses her personal voice.
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