Born near Chicago to immigrants from India, Archana Maniar relocated with her parents to Mumbai at age four. After the culture shock abated, she fell in love with her homeland until chance brought the family to California. During vacations and family occasions, Mumbai was a frequent destination. She attended college at UCLA, where she studied political theory and biology before attending medical school at the University of California, Davis. As a professor of medicine and practicing infectious disease physician, she was a frontline healthcare worker from the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and was deeply involved in health system pandemic preparedness. Always a writer in the margins of her day, storytelling became an obsession during her medical career, a way to process her observations about human nature during health, stress, and sickness. With a stubborn case of wanderlust, when she is not working or writing, she is usually traveling somewhere with her family.
