Rosemary Mahoney was educated at Harvard College and John Hopkins University and has been awarded numerous awards for her writing, including a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Whiting Writers Award, a nomination for the National Book Critics' Circle Award, a Transatlantic Review Award for Fiction, and Harvard's Charles E. Horman Prize for writing. She is the author of Down the Nile; Alone in a Fisherman's Skiff, a New York Times Notable Book, A Likely Story: One Summer with Lillian Hellman, The Singular Pilgrim: Travels on Sacred Ground, Whoredom in Kimmage: The World of Irish Women, a National Book Critics Award Finalist and New York Times Notable Book, and The Early Arrival of Dreams; A Year in China, a New York Times Notable Book. She is a citizen of Ireland and the United States and lives in Rhode island