Mary Pipher

Mary Elizabeth Pipher (born October 21, 1947), also known as Mary Bray Pipher, is an American clinical psychologist and author. Her books include A Life in Light: Meditations on Impermanence (2022)^[1] and Women Rowing North (2019), a book on aging gracefully.^[2][3] Prior to that, she wrote The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture (2013) and the bestseller Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (1994).

Pipher received a Bachelor of Arts degree in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1969 and a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in 1977. She was a Rockefeller Scholar in Residence at Bellagio in 2001. She received two American Psychological Association Presidential Citations. She returned the one she received in 2006 as a protest against the APA's acknowledgment that some of its members participate in controversial interrogation techniques at Guantánamo Bay and at US "black sites".^[4]

Pipher participates actively in Nebraska state legislature and voices her opinion through letters to the editor of the Lincoln Journal Star. She wrote an essay for The New York Times about the difficulty of Nebraska's mixed political views and need for more progressive politicians. She strongly opposes the Keystone XL Pipeline^[5] and supported the Nebraska Legislative Bill 802, the purpose of which was to create a state task force to combat climate change, calling it "an opportunity to educate and work through problems relating to climate change."^[6]

As of 2019^[update] she resides in Lincoln, Nebraska.^[7]