Tara Maya has lived in Africa, Europe, Asia, as well as North America. She’s pounded sorghum with mortar and pestle in a little clay village where the jungle meets the desert, meditated in a Buddhist monastery in the Himalayas, and sailed the Volga River to a secret city that was once the heart of the Soviet space program. This first-hand experience, as well as research into the strange and piquant histories of lost civilizations, has inspired her writing. 

Her terrible housekeeping, however, is entirely the fault of pixies.