Marisa Crane

Marisa Crane, who now publishes as Mac Crane, was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, grew up in Philadelphia and played Division I basketball at Drexel. Crane is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns. Their first book was a poetry collection, Our Debatable Bodies, issued by Animal Heart Press in 2019. I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself (Catapult, 2023) began as a short story and became their first novel: in it the Department of Balance has dropped prison in favour of issuing an extra shadow to anyone found guilty, and Kris, grieving her wife and raising a baby born with a second shadow of her own, tries to hold a household together among others the Department has marked. It won the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for speculative fiction. A basketball novel, A Sharp Endless Need, followed from Dial Press in 2025.