About Me


Photo by Erin Manfredi
Photo by Marian Lopez



Hi! I'm Mara, and I'm a writer. I have worked professionally as a journalist, a magazine writer and editor, a literary agency assistant, and an author signing manager, but my real passion is writing fiction. After several attempts at women's fiction, I wrote a young adult fantasy novel and fell in love with the genre. I recently finished a Russian fairytale retelling and an upper YA fantasy, and I have a couple ideas in my back pocket for when I get bored. If I'm not working, mothering, wifing, or writing, I'm probably reading or blogging.

Fortunately my husband is an excellent cook.

I'm a triplet born on Leap Day. What are the odds of that, you ask? Here's the math (done by someone much smarter than me):

\left(\frac{100-4+1}{365\cdot 400+100-4+1}\right)\left(\frac{3}{8000}\right)= \frac{291}{1168776000}\approx\frac{1}{4016412} \approx 0.249 \times 10^{-7}.
(The current US population is 311,591,917, so that means there are roughly 77 triplets in the US with leap day birthdays.)

I am a diplomat's wife, a former Marine wife, and the mother of an octopus-obsessed three-year-old a LEGO-obsessed four-year-old named Jack, and our adorable new addition, Will. I currently live in Alexandria, VA, in between our first Foreign Service post in Yekaterinburg, Russia, and our next stop, Lima, Peru! Please join me at my Foreign Service blog, Most Eligible Family, for more info.