Marie Arana was born in Peru, the daughter of Jorge Arana Cisneros, a Peruvian born civil engineer, and Marie Elverine Clapp Campbell, an American from Kansas and Boston, whose family has deep roots in United States. She moved with her parents to Summit, New Jersey at the age of 9. She later 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. At Northwestern she joined Delta Gamma and was honored as Homecoming Queen. 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 and the Library of Congress in hosting the annual National Book Festival on the Washington Mall. She is currently the Literary Director of the Library of Congress and directs all programming for the NationalBook Festival among numerous other programs at the Library. Arana is a Writer at Large for The Washington Post. She is married to Jonathan Yardley, the Posts former 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. Marie Arana is the author of a memoir about a bicultural childhood American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood ; editor of a collection of Washington Post essays about the writer's craft, The Writing Life ; and the author of Cellophane. Her most recent novel, published in January 2009, is Lima Nights. The Spanish edition of Bolívar: Libertador Americano was published the same year by Penguin Random House. In October 2019, Carla Hayden, Librarian of Congress, named her Literary Director of the Library of Congress. Bolivar and Silver, Sword and Stone have received accusations of hispanophobia, antiespañolismo, stereotyping, sectarianism and misinformation.
