Mary Higgins Clark chats with English professor Mary Bly’s class at the Lincoln Center campus in March 2012. Photo by Bud Glick

Mary Higgins Clark, FCLC ’79, whose 42 books have sold 85 million copies in the United States alone, has pledged $2 million to Fordham University to create the Mary Higgins Clark Chair in Creative Writing.

The gift will make it possible for Fordham to hire a professor of creative writing within the Department of English. The chair will be a visiting appointment for a limited term, offered to a distinguished writer and drawn from a variety of genres. The chair holder will lead writing workshops and teach seminars and master classes to upper-level undergraduates or graduate students.

The first holder of the chair will be announced in the spring of 2015.

This is not the first gift from Higgins Clark, who served as a University trustee from 1990 to 1996, delivered the University’s commencement address in 1997, and received the Fordham Founder’s Award in 2004. In the late 1990s, she helped fund the construction of the William D. Walsh Family Library.

“I always knew I wanted to make another gift to Fordham,” she said. “At my age, at 85-and-a-half, if I don’t decide to do it soon, who knows?”