MARY FRANÇOIS ROCKCASTLE

Mary François Rockcastle is the author of Rainy Lake, published by Graywolf Press in 1995, and the recently published In Caddis Wood, also from Graywolf Press. Rainy Lake was nominated for a Minnesota Book Award and earned a “Best Book for the Teen Age” by the New York Public Library. She is the recipient of a Bush Foundation Fellowship and a Loft-McKnight Award of Distinction, both in fiction. 

After completing an M.A. with a double emphasis in English and creative writing from the University of Minnesota, Mary joined the adjunct faculty in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program at Hamline University. She and her colleagues worked together to develop and launch the MFA in Creative Writing program at Hamline, where she also began teaching. In 1997 she founded Water~Stone Review, a literary magazine which has earned numerous Pushcart Prizes and other honorable and notable mentions and for which she was awarded the W. Lindberg Award for Excellence in Literary Editing in 2009. She remains the executive editor.

In 1999 Rockcastle became Director of the Graduate Liberal Studies Programs at Hamline and in 2004 was made founding dean of the Graduate School of Liberal Studies (GLS). As Dean, she launched a low-residency MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults in 2007 and a BFA in creative writing in 2010. When GLS merged with the College of Liberal Arts in 2011, she became Director of The Creative Writing Programs and the Head of the Office of Graduate and Interdisciplinary Programs. 

She is married to architect Garth Rockcastle and lives in Minneapolis. Her older daughter, Maura Rockcastle, is a landscape architect and lives with her husband and son in Brooklyn. Her younger daughter, Siobhan Rockcastle, is an architect living and working in Boston.