Mary Anne Mercer writes from her home in Seattle overlooking the Salish Sea. She has published on a wide range of topics related to social justice, global health, and globalization, as well as academic topics. She spent over 35 years working as university faculty, focusing on strategies to improve the health and survival of pregnant women and their children in resource-poor areas of the world.
Mary Anne went to Nepal as a nurse practitioner in 1978, where she spent a year trekking from village to village with a team of local staff providing immunizations and other services to rural families. In 2022 she published a memoir of that time, Beyond the Next Village: A Year of Magic and Medicine in Nepal. The experience shaped the remainder of her career, which she has spent working, teaching and writing about global public health. With a focus on the care of childbearing women and their newborns, Mercer has developed or supported health programs in 14 different countries in Asia and Africa. She has a particular interest in the effect of globalization on health, co-editing and contributing two chapters to a book on that topic. She was featured in a 2015 article in The Johns Hopkins University Alumni Magazine for her latest work in Timor-Leste, a mobile phone project for pregnant women in rural areas.
Mercer was raised in rural Montana; she and her husband continue to spend time there on a small ranch near Red Lodge.
