After growing up on Long Island, NY, Marcia moved to New York City in 1979 after graduating from Williams College with a BA in English. Her first two years post-college were spent working at the publishing house Farrar, Straus & Giroux and as a commercial photographer, including summers as the photographer for the Williamstown Theater Festival.

Subsequently, she went back to graduate school for a doctorate in Psychology. She worked as a Senior Psychologist in the city hospital system in NY, teaching and supervising residents and interns at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, as well as working in her own private practice in Brooklyn. In 1993 she and her husband Tom (a former Literary Arts Board member and Chair) moved from Brooklyn, NY to Portland for quality-of-life reasons and have not looked back. She spent the remainder of her career, retiring in the spring of 2022, as a clinical psychologist in private practice in Portland. She was also Chair of the Oregon Psychological Association’s Ethics Committee, its President, and for the last 6 years the Chair of the Confidential Peer Support Committee, providing confidential consultation for colleagues. She was also Chair of the Squash Committee at the Multnomah Athletic Club for two years.

She and Tom split their time between homes in Portland and on San Juan Island and have two grown kids living and working in Brooklyn, NY and Miami, FL. In addition to an abiding passion for reading and Literary Arts, Marcia maintains active and lifelong interests in playing doubles squash (played Varsity squash and tennis for Williams), pickleball, birding, designing and making stained glass windows.