Meredith Maran published her first poem in Highlights For Kids at age 6, her first national magazine article at age 15, and her first book at age 18. In the years that followed she built a house and raised goats outside Taos, lived with the cast of "Hair" in London, and installed brakes and union consciousness on the Ford assembly line in San Jose. After a brief and stultifying stint in Silicon Valley, Meredith became Editor of the Banana Republic Magalog, then created award-winning socially responsible marketing campaigns for companies including Ben & Jerry's, Working Assets, Stonyfield Farm, Smith & Hawken, and Odwalla.

Meredith resumed her journalistic career in 1982. Since then she has written and co-authored eight books, several of them San Francisco Chronicle best-sellers, all of them focused on her greatest passion: the difference between how things are in America and how they should be--and what we can do about it. She writes features, essays, and book reviews for Playboy, Self, Real Simple, Vibe, Ladies Home Journal, Mother Jones, Bride's, and contributes regularly to Salon.com, Health, the San Francisco Chronicle, Family Circle, and More magazines.

Delighted to realize that people will actually pay her to do what she does best, Meredith has been a keynote speaker at venues including the 2008 SNAP Conference (Science•Nature•Art•People), the California Writer's Club, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Charles Schwab Foundation, Stanford University, UC Berkeley, Educators for Social Responsibility, and the Education Writers of America.

From 2004-2006 she was Writer in Residence at UCLA. In 2006 she was Writer in Residence at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House in Taos. She has cherished her residencies at Yaddo, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Mesa Refuge, and Ragdale.

Meredith lives in Oakland and has two grown (and growing) sons, Peter (Peter Graham Photography) and Jesse (About Jesse Graham). She has been happily married to the horticultural genius Katrine Thomas since long before "gay wedding" yielded 1,120,000 hits on Google.