Mary Pauline Lowry Books in Order

Mary Pauline Lowry is an Austin, Texas, native whose fiction follows women trying to make a life on their own terms, often in places that are demanding, strange, or changing fast. Her books move from the Texas-Mexico border to wildfire country, Austin streets, and a hometown mystery with a very inconvenient body in a car trunk.

Her route to fiction has included some far-from-desk jobs. Lowry has worked in construction, advocated to end violence against women, and spent two seasons as a wildland firefighter with the Pike Interagency Hotshot Crew. She also earned a master’s degree in English from the University of Texas.

Those experiences gave her plenty of real-world pressure to write from.

Her early novel, The Earthquake Machine, centers on Rhonda, a fourteen-year-old whose home life is coming apart. After Jesús, the family’s yardman and the person she trusts most, is deported to Oaxaca, Rhonda runs away across the Rio Grande and into Mexico to find him. The trip becomes a story of survival, identity, and the uneasy passage from childhood into something tougher.

In Wildfire, Lowry drew on her own time on a hotshot crew. Julie, grieving and adrift after college, signs on to fight fires in the American West. As the only woman on an elite crew, she has to keep up with punishing work, earn a place among men who doubt her, and face the personal problems she hoped a hard season on the fire line might solve.

Lowry later completed an MFA in creative writing at Boise State University, where she taught introductory creative writing. A classroom exercise helped set The Roxy Letters in motion: she asked students to imagine their quirkiest friend writing an angry letter, then did the assignment herself. That first letter became the opening of the novel.

The Roxy Letters introduces Roxy, a struggling Austin artist writing to Everett, her ex-boyfriend and unreliable new roommate. Through her letters, Roxy vents about deli work, rent, romance, friendship, and the corporate changes reshaping the city she loves. Readers who enjoy comic, messy characters and a strong sense of place will find a lot to like in Roxy’s running commentary.

With Last Night Was Killer, Lowry brings that humor into a mystery. Heartbroken single mother Tilly Turner takes an intro pole-dancing class in hopes of cheering herself up, then wakes after a wild night out to find a dead man in her trunk. It is a comic setup with real stakes, and another example of Lowry putting an unsettled woman at the center of the action.

Lowry is a lecturer in fiction at Boise State University. Alongside her novels, she has contributed to O Magazine, and her work has appeared in major newspapers, magazines, and literary outlets. Across her books, she returns to work, friendship, bodily risk, family strain, and the stubborn hope that a person can still choose a new direction.