Mary Hood (born September 16, 1946 in Brunswick, Georgia) is a fiction writer of predominantly Southern literature, who has authored three short story collections – How Far She Went, And Venus is Blue and A Clear View of the Southern Sky – two novellas – And Venus is Blue (also the title of her second short story collection) and Seam Busters – and a novel, Familiar Heat. She also regularly publishes essays and reviews in literary and popular magazines. Hood was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2014. Family and home Mary Hood was born in Brunswick, Georgia, on September 16, 1946, to William Charles Hood and Mary Adella Katherine Rogers Hood. Hood's father was an aircraft worker, originally from Manhattan, New York. Her mother was a Latin teacher, originally from rural Cherokee County, Georgia. The two met during World War II at a United Service Organizations event in Brunswick. At the age of two, Hood and her family moved from coastal Brunswick to White, Georgia, where they briefly lived with her maternal grandfather, Claude Montgomery Rogers, who was a Methodist minister. Shortly thereafter, the family moved to Douglas County, and, subsequently, multiple other places across rural north and south Georgia. Hood graduated from Worth County High School in Sylvester, Georgia, and then moved to Clayton County just outside Atlanta, where she commuted back and forth to Georgia State University. After obtaining a degree in Spanish and working for two years as a librarian in Douglasville, Georgia, Hood bought land and moved to Cherokee County near Woodstock, Georgia. Hood lived in Woodstock (in the small lake community of Little Victoria on the banks of Lake Allatoona) for 30 years, where she witnessed the small, rural town turn into a bedroom community for burgeoning Atlanta – much of which is fictionally chronicled in her short story collection And Venus is Blue. In the early 2000s, she left the now metro-Atlanta-Woodstock area for the quiet countryside of Jackson County, Georgia, where she currently resides. Awards Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction (1984) (How Far She Went) The Southern Review /Louisiana State University Short Fiction Award (1984)(How Far She Went) National Magazine Award in fiction (1986) "Something Good for Ginnie" Lillian Smith Book Award (1987) (And Venus is Blue) Dixie Council of Authors and Journalists Author-of-the-Year Award (1987)(And Venus is Blue) Townsend Prize for Fiction (1988)(And Venus is Blue) Whiting