With the given name of Mary Elizabeth Fitzgerald, this gal was born to be a writer. From a typical Irish-American Boston neighborhood, Mary, along with her three brothers and two sisters, were hardly the Brady Bunch. Her compulsion to sort out the eccentricities of her family and environment with innate irony and wit has kept her extremely grounded and given her much fodder for her natural storytelling talent. And so from an early age, she wrote — stories, poems, novellas — her work reflecting an ever-widening experience, from a blue collar upbringing through a chance at a prep school education, which led to Wellesley College then on to NYU graduate writing program. Few people can treat such disparate social worlds with such unassuming ease as Mary can. There's an honest openness and unstintingly accurate eye behind all that she writes.

Mary's talents were first formally recognized when she won the Academy of American Poets Prize as an undergraduate at Wellesley College. She went on to receive a full fellowship to NYU's Graduate Fiction Writing Program where she also taught undergraduate fiction and poetry workshops while studying under writers such as E.L. Doctorow, Peter Carey, Stephen McCauley, Jayne Anne Phillips and Sharon Olds.

After completing a novel (More Than Miles) and securing her first literary agent, Mary went on to co-write and produce an independent feature film, "Monumental," a dramatic comedy about the reluctant producer of a cable comedy show who finds the courage to follow his own dream in spite of its uncertain future.

Not one to limit herself to any one genre, Mary then landed a job as a staff writer on the Fox sitcom "Costello" which took her to Los Angeles and into the world of television. Mary's other TV writing credits include "Tough Crowd" with Colin Quinn.