Tamora Pierce

Tamora Pierce, born December 13, 1954, in South Connellsville, Pennsylvania, is an American writer of fantasy fiction for teenagers, best known for stories centered on young heroines. Her work reached readers beginning in the 1980s, when fantasy for young people could still feel short on girls who sought power, skill, and public purpose. Pierce helped answer that absence with characters who trained, fought, studied, made mistakes, and kept going.

Her first book series, The Song of the Lioness, was published from 1983 to 1988 and made her name. Its main character, Alanna, faces the trials and triumphs of training as a knight. The first book, Alanna: The First Adventure, was published by Atheneum Books in 1983, after Pierce had written the books that became the quartet while she was at the University of Pennsylvania. Another major quartet, Protector of the Small, followed from 1999 to 2002. In 2013, the Young Adult Library Services Association of the American Library Association gave Pierce the Margaret A. Edwards Award, citing both Song of the Lioness and Protector of the Small for their “significant and lasting contribution to young adult literature.” Her books have been translated into twenty languages.

Pierce’s early life moved between Pennsylvania and California. She was born to Wayne and Mary Lou Pierce; her mother had meant to name her Tamara, but the nurse filling out the birth certificate wrote Tamora. Her sister Kimberly, on whom Alanna was based, was born when Pierce was five, and her sister Melanie a year later. Pierce lived in Dunbar from age five to eight, then moved with her family in 1963 to California, with homes in San Mateo, Miramar, El Granada, and Burlingame. After her parents divorced, her mother brought Pierce and her sisters back to Fayette County in 1969. Pierce attended Albert Gallatin Senior High for two years, then Uniontown Area Senior High School for her senior year, where she acted, sang, and wrote for the school paper.

She began reading very young and started writing in sixth grade. Her interest in fantasy and science fiction began after she was introduced to J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and she began writing the kind of books she loved to read. Pierce has said she first wrote to escape the drama of her parents’ divorce, beginning with fan fiction that closely imitated favorite stories. She later chose to write about strong female characters because she had noticed how few appeared in the books she read as a girl.

Her imagination drew from many sources close at hand. On her homepage, Pierce has said she gets most ideas from things she stumbles upon, and that “The best way to prepare to have ideas when you need them is to listen to and encourage your obsessions.” Crocheting shaped her idea of magic as woven threads, while British naturalist David Attenborough’s nature documentaries shaped how she thought about mages. Fantasy novels, Arthurian legend, youth crime, and cholera outbreaks in Africa also fed her worlds. People and animals around her entered the fiction too: Alanna was loosely based on Kimberly, Thayet’s appearance on a friend, and Beka’s pigeon friends on real pigeons Pierce knew.

Pierce later lived with her husband, Tim Liebe, in New York City, with four cats and multiple other pets, before moving to Syracuse, New York. From about 2001 to 2006, she was active in moderating and discussing her novels on the message board Sheroes Central. In 2008, she donated her archive to the department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Northern Illinois University. Her work remains meaningful to readers because it gives young people, especially girls, stories in which courage is practiced, ambition is allowed, and becoming strong is shown as a process rather than a gift.