Marina Budhos is an author of award-winning fiction and nonfiction.

Her newest novel, We Are All We Have, a Kirkus Best Book of 2022, is about Rania, a 17-year-old girl bursting with dreams, an asylum-seeker, when suddenly her life is shattered, and she takes to the road–in search of sanctuary and family truths.

Prior to that she published The Long Ride, about three mixed race girls during  a 1970s integration struggle.  Watched  takes on surveillance in a post 9/11 era and tells the story of Naeem—a teenage boy whose mistakes catch up with him and the cops offer him a dark deal.  Watched received an  Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature YA Honor (APALA) and is an Honor Book for The Walter Award  (We Need Diverse Books).

Marina also published her second co-authored book with husband Marc Aronson, Eyes of the World: Robert Capa & Gerda Taro & The Invention of Modern Photojournalism. Among the first to depict modern warfare, Capa and Taro took powerful photographs of the Spanish Civil War that went straight from the devastation to news magazines, and helped give birth to the idea of bearing witness with technology.  Eyes of the World is a 2017 YALSA Finalist in Nonfiction.  Their previous book, Sugar Changed the World: A Story of Magic, Spice, Slavery, Freedom & Science, was a 2010 Los Angeles Times Book Award Finalist and also a YALSA Finalist in Nonfiction.

Marina is also the author of the young adult novels Tell Us We’re Home, which was a 2017 Essex County YA Pick and Ask Me No Questions, recipient of the first James Cook Teen Book Award,  a Chicago Library’s Best of the Best.  She has published the adult novels The Professor of Light and House of Waiting, and a nonfiction book, Remix: Conversations with Immigrant Teenagers. Her work has been translated into German, Arabic, Korean, Japanese, and other languages, and her short work has appeared in publications such as The Daily Beast, LitHub, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The Nation, Dissent, Marie Claire, Redbook, Travel & Leisure, and in anthologies.

Marina has received an NEA Literature Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Award for Women Writers, three Fellowships from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, and has been a Fulbright Scholar to India.  A graduate of Cornell and Brown universities, she is a professor emerita at English at William Paterson University, and frequently gives talks throughout the country and abroad.

She is married to the author Marc Aronson and lives in New Jersey with their two sons, Sasha and Rafi.