Mariah E. Marsden is a writer and folklorist who has found her way to North Carolina after growing up in the Missouri Ozarks. She's currently at UNC-Chapel Hill as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Grant Operations Mangement and Creative Engagement and part of the Arts & Humanities Grant Studio, where she helps manage grant-funded projects and collaborates with PIs to help ​grow and support their work.

Mariah received her PhD in English and Folklore Studies from The Ohio State University and her MFA in Creative Writing & Media Arts from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Her dissertation explored the entanglements of tradition and rural print culture in the Ozark region. She’s worked in archives, editorial departments, and in the field on ethnographic projects ranging from the digitization of Ohio farm books to the imagined geographies of tabletop gaming spaces. As a 2022 Library of Congress Junior Fellow, Mariah curated an online exhibit on diverse agricultural histories in public media for the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. She's also the co-author of two graphic novel adaptations, Anne of Green Gables: A Graphic Novel and The Secret Garden: A Graphic Novel, with plans for more collaborations on the way.