Francesca Mari is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine. Send tips to

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Francesca Mari

Francesca Mari is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine based in Providence, RI. She has written features on housing, con men, and other abuses of power for them as well as for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Texas Monthly, The New York Review of Books, The Cut, and others. She is a 2022 National Fellow at New America and a 2023 Radcliffe Fellow.

She has written cover stories for The New York Times Magazine on the pandemic real estate boom (which was made into an episode of The Daily) and the rise of private equity landlords. Her Atlantic piece about the identity theft of 40,000 Vietnamese fishermen was optioned by Campfire and her essay “The Assistant Economy” was anthologized in the Best Business Writing 2015. “The Talented Mr. Khater,” a true crime story about an international conman who buried a woman alive, was named one of the 10 best stories of the year by Longform in 2015, highlighted on NPR, and won the City and Regional Magazine Award for feature writing. She has toured with Pop-Up Magazine to sold-out venues across the country, including BAM, The Ace Theater in LA, The Paramount, and the Aspen Ideas Festival main stage. She was a 2019 MacDowell fellow in nonfiction and a 2020 Yaddo fellow.

A native of San Francisco and a graduate of Harvard, she worked as a senior editor at California Sunday from 2016 to 2018 and as an editor and writer at Texas Monthly, from 2012 to 2016. She teaches narrative nonfiction at Brown University.