Merritt Tierce was born and raised in Texas. She worked in various secretarial and hospitality positions until 2009, when she moved to Iowa City to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop as the Meta Rosenberg Fellow.
After graduating in 2011 with her MFA from Iowa, she received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and she is a 2013 National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Author. Merritt served as the Executive Director of the Texas Equal Access Fund, a Dallas-based nonprofit abortion fund, from 2011 until 2014. She volunteered and worked for the TEA Fund from its founding in 2004, and co-wrote the abortion play “One in 3” with Gretchen Dyer and Victoria Loe Hicks. “One in 3” played to sold-out houses for most of its three-week run and stimulated a local conversation about the reality of abortion in women’s lives.
Merritt’s first published story, Suck It, was selected by ZZ Packer to be anthologized in the 2008 edition of New Stories from the South, and