Mara Hvistendahl has reported from the Tibetan plateau, the Amazon rainforest, and rural Texas for publications including Science, Harper's, The New Republic, Scientific American, the Financial Times magazine, Popular Science, Foreign Policy, and the Los Angeles Times. A former correspondent for The Chronicle of Higher Education and contributing editor at Seed magazine, Mara has won an Education Writers Association award and been nominated for the Newswomen's Club of New York Front Page Award.

After receiving a B.A. from Swarthmore College in comparative literature and Chinese, Mara attended Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, graduating in 2003. Proficient in Mandarin and Spanish, she has lived in northern Mexico and Shanghai, where she taught journalism at Fudan University. Mara is now writing her first book, a narrative nonfiction work on prenatal sex selection and gender imbalance, due out in 2011 from Public Affairs. She lives in the Netherlands.