Tamora Pierce

Pierce was born in South Connellsville, Pennsylvania in Fayette County, on December 13, 1954. Her mother wanted to name her "Tamara" but the nurse who filled out her birth certificate misspelled it as "Tamora".^[5] When she was five, her sister Kimberly (on whom she based Alanna)^[6] was born and a year later her second sister, Melanie, was born. From the time she was five until she was eight, she lived in Dunbar. In June 1963 she and her family moved to California. They first lived in San Mateo on El Camino Real and then moved to the other side of the San Francisco Peninsula, in Miramar. They lived in Miramar for half a year, in El Granada a full year, and then three years in Burlingame.

She began reading when she was very young and started writing when she was in the sixth grade. Her interest in fantasy and science fiction began when she was introduced to J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and so she started to write the kind of books that she was reading. After her parents divorced, her mother moved her and her sisters back to Fayette County in 1969, where she spent two years at Albert Gallatin Senior High. When her family moved again, she spent her senior year at Uniontown Area Senior High School, acting, singing, and writing for the school paper. She is an alumna of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

While at the University of Pennsylvania, Pierce wrote the books that became The Song of the Lioness quartet. The first book of this quartet, Alanna: The First Adventure was published by Atheneum Books in 1983.

Pierce lived with her husband Tim Liebe (Spouse-Creature) in New York City, with their four cats and multiple other pets, until they moved to Syracuse, New York.^[7]

In 2008, she donated her archive to the department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Northern Illinois University.^[8][9]

Pierce was also actively involved in moderating and discussing her novels on a message board called Sheroes Central from about 2001-2006, at which point it was acquired by a third party.^{[10][11][12][13][14]}

On her homepage, Pierce states she gets most ideas from things she stumbles upon. Her concept of magic as a tapestry of threads comes from her experiences in crocheting, and in her world, all mages are somehow based on British naturalist David Attenborough after watching his nature documentaries. Fantasy novels and Arthurian legend were the base of the worlds she thought up as a girl, and later she added contemporary issues like youth crime and cholera outbreaks in Africa. In general, Pierce states: "The best way to prepare to have ideas when you need them is to listen to and encourage your obsessions."^[15][16]

Pierce draws on elements of people and animals around her for inspiration. The character of Alanna is loosely based on Pierce's sister.^[17] Thayet's appearance is based on a friend of Pierce's. Beka's pigeon friends in Provost's Dog are all based on actual pigeons of Pierce's acquaintance.^[18]

Pierce first started writing to escape from the drama of her parents' divorce. She wrote fan fiction based on her favorite stories, imitating them closely.^[17] Pierce says she decided to write her stories about strong female characters because she noticed a lack of them in the books she read when she was young.^[19]

In November 2018, the first line of officially licensed merchandise was created in partnership with Dual Wield Studio: pins, apparel and accessories developed in collaboration with creators from the Tamora Pierce fanbase.^[30] The collection expanded in 2020 to include a rendition of the map of Tortall.^[31]

At the end of 2023, Dual Wield Studio announced a new collection celebrating the 40th anniversary of Alanna: The First Adventure.^[32]

• "Podcast Interview about 'White Tiger' with Tamora Pierce and Timothy Liebe" Archived 2006-11-06 at the Wayback Machine
• "Tiger Tiger Burning Bright: Pierce Talks 'White Tiger'" Archived 2007-03-11 at the Wayback Machine by David Richards, Comic Book Resources, March 6, 2006
• "Eye of the White Tiger: Meet Marvel's Tamora Pierce"^{[permanent dead link‍]} by Newsarama, February 27, 2006
• Brown, Joanne; St. Clair, Nancy (2002). Declarations of Independence: Empowered Girls in Young Adult Literature, 1990–2001. Scarecrow Studies in Young Adult Literature. Vol. 7. Lanham, MD, & London: The Scarecrow Press. ISBN 0-8108-4290-4.
• Cart, Michael, From Romance to Realism: 50 Years of Growth and Change in Young Adult Literature (New York: HarperCollins, 1996) ISBN 0-06-446161-0
• Dailey, Donna (2006). Tamora Pierce. Who Wrote That?. New York: Chelsea House. ISBN 0791087956.
• Egoff, Sheila A., Worlds Within: Children’s Fantasy from the Middle Ages to Today (Chicago & London: American Library Association, 1988) ISBN 0-8389-0494-7
• Melano, Anne L., "Utopias of Violence: Pierce's Knights of Tortall and the Contemporary Heroic" Archived 2011-06-10 at the Wayback Machine (Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics, vol 3 issue 2, 2009)
• Lennard, John, Tamora Pierce: The Immortals (Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2007) ISBN 978-1-84760-037-0
• -- 'Of Stormwings and Valiant Women: The Tortallan World of Tamora Pierce', in Of Modern Dragons and other essays on Genre Fiction (Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2007), pp. 191–228 ISBN 978-1-84760-038-7
• Sullivan III, C. W., ed., Young Adult Science Fiction (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999 Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy 79) ISBN 0-313-28940-9
• Trites, Roberta Seelinger, Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000) ISBN 0-87745-857-X

• Official Website
• Tamora Pierce at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB)
• Tamora Pierce at Library of Congress, with 58 library catalog records
• Publisher: Science Fiction Book Club (SFBC) at ISFDB
• Publisher Page
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• Amazon
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