Mariah K. Young was born in Alameda, California, and spent her childhood living in the Bay Area and in Lahaina, Hawai'i. She graduated with an English degree from California State University, East Bay—she still calls it Cal State Hayward, even though no one's counting anymore—where she won the first annual RV Williams prize for fiction. In 2008, she earned her MFA in creative writing from UC Riverside, and that same year, she attended the Squaw Valley Writers' workshop on fellowship. She currently teaches writing in downtown Los Angeles, and lives in Hollywood, where she is hard at work on a novel (when she's not grading essays).
