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==