Doris Piserchia was born Doris Summers on October 11, 1928 in Fairmont, West Virginia. She earned a Bachelor of Arts from Fairmont State College in 1950. Although her family expected her to go into teaching, Piserchia had no interested in teaching an instead, after graduation, she served in the United States Navy until 1954, achieving the rank of Lieutenant. While in the Navy, she married Joseph Piserchia, who was serving in the Army. They would have five children. In the early 1960s, Piserchia attended the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, studying educational psychology.

Piserchia’s publishing career didn’t begin until she sold “Rocket to Gehenna” to Joseph Ross at Fantastic, where it appeared in the September 1966 issue. In some ways, “Rocket to Gehenna” was a false start for Piserchia. It is not like any of her other works and she wouldn’t publish again for six years, until “Sheltering Dream” appeared in Worlds of If, which published two more of her stories that year.

The following year, 1973, saw Piserchia break into anthologies with “Half the Kingdom” appearing in Damon Knight’s Orbit 12. She would appear in five successive volumes of Orbit. Her short fiction career, however, was brief, with her final short story, “Deathrights Deferred” appearing in Science Fiction Discoveries, edited by Carol and Frederik Pohl, in 1976, although he story “The Residents of Kingston,” sold to Harlan Ellison, would eventually appear in the J. Michael Straczynski edited Last Dangerous Visions in 2024.

Piserchia also published her first novel Mister Justice, in 1973. Mister Justice was half of an Ace Double, partnered with John T. Phillifent’s Hierarchies.  It would be the first of thirteen novels published in ten years. Her next two novels sold to Bantam, and with her fourth novel, Earthchild, she moved to DAW, which published the rest of her novels. Two of her DAW novels, Blood Country and I, Zombie, were published under the pseudonym Curt Selby at the request of Donald A. Wollheim since DAW was publishing five of her novels in two years and he was concerned about overloading the market for Doris Piserchia novels.

Piserchia has stated that she wrote all of her novels quickly, before she could lose interest in them, which meant that she also skimped on rewriting them. Because of this, she feels that her short stories, which she did spend time rewriting, were generally better than her longer works.

In 1983, Piserchia decided she would look for a publisher with a larger distribution. However, fate intervened. Her older daughter, Linda, became ill and moved back home so Piserchia could take care of her.  After several visits to different doctors to determine what was wrong, her daughter died on an undiagnosed brain tumor. Piserchia’s son in law died three years later and Piserchia wound up raising her granddaughter, who was three when Linda died. Doris and Joe adopted her when she was twelve, but Joe died within a few years.

Around 2000, Piserchia was considering restarting her writing career, but she found that the stories she was writing were not grabbing the attention of people she was showing them to. Rather than trying to figure out the changes to the business, she destroyed those stories and eventually stopped writing.

Mister Justice was optioned for film and other companies contacted her about possibly optioning The Spinner or Earthchild, but as with most film optioning offers, nothing ever came of the initial interest. Between 2012 and 2015,Orion books in the United Kingdom reprinted all of PIserchia’s novels as part of their Gateway series, making them available as ebooks to a new generation of readers.

Piserchia died on September 15, 2021 in Hackensack, New Jersey.

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Steven H Silver is a twenty-one-time Hugo Award nominee and was the publisher of the Hugo-nominated fanzine Argentus as well as the editor and publisher of ISFiC Press for eight years. He has also edited books for DAW, NESFA Press, and ZNB. His most recent anthology is Alternate Peace and his novel After Hastings was published in 2020. Steven has chaired the first Midwest Construction, Windycon three times, and the SFWA Nebula Conference numerous times. He was programming chair for Chicon 2000 and Vice Chair of Chicon 7.