Mary Ward Brown (June 18, 1917 – May 14, 2013) was an American short story writer and memoirist.

Her works largely feature Alabama as a setting and have received several awards.

[2] Her first collection of short stories, Tongues of Flame, published in 1986, won the PEN/Hemingway (1987), the Alabama Author Award (1987), the Lillian Smith Book Award (1991), and the Hillsdale Fiction Prize (2003).

[4] Author Paul Theroux has said of her writing that it was "...direct, unaffected, unsentimental, and powerful for its simplicity and for its revealing the inner life of rural Alabama...".

[6] Southern journalist John S. Sledge called Brown "our genius, our Chekov".