Merritt Tierce

• 2019 Whiting Foundation 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]