Maria Tatar is a professor of Germanic Language and Literature and of Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University. She is a member of the Society of Fellows of said university. The author of numerous books on folklore, Germanic cultural studies, and children's literature, she has also written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and Slate, and is a frequent guest on NPR and the BBC. She was the recipient of the 2018 NAACP Image Award for Most Outstanding Work of Fiction and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.