Wizard, Mariann G.

Austin political activist and writer Mariann Wizard was born Mariann Exia Garner on September 30, 1946, in Fort Worth, Texas, to Carl Douglas and Alma Catherine (Cooper) Garner. Entering the University of Texas at Austin in 1964, she joined the Students for a Democratic Society and Communist Party and became involved in local political and cultural activities, including demonstrations at Roy’s Lounge. On December 18, 1965, Wizard married fellow activist George Vizard, IV (1943-1967), whom Robert Zani murdered during an Austin convenience store holdup on July 23, 1967. Following Vizard’s death, she began using the pen name Mariann G. Wizard.

In 1970, Wizard married local writer/activist Larry Waterhouse, and the couple formed Waterwizard Productions. She became involved in a number of journalistic and literary projects as Art Director of Texas Ranger (1969-1970), as Assistant/Associate Editor of Free & Easy (1974-1976), and in other positions. Additionally, she contributed literary and journalistic pieces to a variety of radical/counterculture publications, such as The Rag, The Monterey County Nose, The Dead Tree, The Daily Worker, and NOLA Express . Wizard also co-authored Turning the Guns Around: Notes on the G.I. Movement (1971) and The Adventures of Oat Willie (1987), an underground comic book she penned with artist Jack Jackson, better known as Jaxon.

Following her divorce from Waterhouse, Wizard legally adopted her pen name. She gave up her membership in the Communist Party in 1976 but continued to involve herself with left-oriented causes such as the U.T. shuttle bus driver’s strike (1976) and the Coors Boycott (1977). She also worked with Community United Front, the first black power organization based in East Austin and led by Larry H. Jackson. Wizard also corresponded with Marilyn Buck, one of the Resistance Conspiracy Six radicals imprisoned for domestic terrorism by the Federal authorities. In 1976, she returned to college, attending Juarez-Lincoln University and receiving a B.A. in Communications in 1979. That same year she married Michael Kleinman, which whom she had a son, Matthew.

Her community activism continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s on a less radical level than before, working with the Phogg Phoundation and as an original member of the Austin Cable Television Commission. She also continued writing and contributed pieces to River City Currents and First Computer Chronicle, among others. Wizard’s essay on her involvement in radical youth movements in the 1960s and 1970s appeared in the book No Apologies: Texas Radicals Celebrate the ‘60s, edited by Daryl Janes (1992).

Austin political activist and writer Mariann Wizard (1946-) was an SDS radical and Communist Party member at the University of Texas at Austin in the mid-to-late 1960s and was involved in local political and cultural activities through 1995.

She was also known as Mariann Garner, Mariann Vizard, and Mariann Waterhouse.