Mara Hvistendahl is a peripatetic journalist who has reported everywhere from the Tibetan plateau to the Amazon rainforest. Her work has appeared in such publications as Science, Harper’s, The New Republic, Scientific American, the Financial Times magazine, Foreign Policy, and the Los Angeles Times.

Proficient in Mandarin and Spanish, Hvistendahl has lived in northern Mexico and Shanghai, where she taught journalism at Fudan University (she has an M.S. from Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism). She has won an Education Writers Association award and was nominated for the Newswomen’s Club of New York Front Page Award.  Her book on prenatal sex selection and gender imbalance, titled Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction.