Marie Arana

Marie Arana
Arana speaking at the Peruvian Embassy in Washington, DC in 2010
Born	Peru
Occupation	Author (fiction and nonfiction), Critic
Genre	American literature
Notable works	American Chica, "Cellophane," Lima Nights," "The Writing Life," "Bolívar: American Liberator"

Marie Arana (born Lima, Peru) is an author, editor, journalist, literary critic, and member of the Scholars Council at the Library of Congress.

Marie Arana was born in Peru, the daughter of Jorge Arana Cisneros, a Peruvian born civil engineer, and Marie Elverine Clapp, an American from Kansas and Boston, whose family has deep roots in United States. She moved with her parents to the United States at the age of 9, achieved her B.A. in Russian at Northwestern University, her M.A. in linguistics at Hong Kong University, a certificate of scholarship at Yale University in China, and began her career in book publishing, where she was vice president and senior editor at Harcourt Brace and Simon & Schuster.

For more than a decade she was the editor in chief of "Book World", the book review section of The Washington Post, during which time she instituted the partnership of The Washington Post with the White House (First Lady Laura Bush) and the Library of Congress (Dr. James H. Billington, Librarian of Congress) in hosting the annual National Book Festival on the Washington Mall. She is currently Co-Director of the National Book Festival. Arana is a Writer at Large for The Washington Post. She is married to Jonathan Yardley, the Post's chief book critic, and has two children from a previous marriage, Lalo Walsh and Adam Ward; as well as two stepchildren, Jim Yardley and Bill Yardley.