Tara Lynn Masih grew up on Long Island’s north shore, in the small harbor town of East Northport. A bicultural author, she is the daughter of Lalit K. Masih (the first prominent Indian-American watercolorist) and Sandra Kolyer (who descends from many European ethnicities). 

After graduating from C.W. Post College with a major in English and minor in sociology, she moved to Boston and earned an MA in Writing and Publishing from Emerson College, where she taught freshman composition and grammar and tutored students with writing challenges. She worked as publisher’s assistant to Pym-Randall Press; as assistant editor to STORIES literary magazine; and as an editorial assistant in Little, Brown's college division. She rose to book editor at Bedford Books/St. Martin’s Press, and then freelanced as a book packager, copyeditor, and proofreader for such companies as Houghton Mifflin, Ballantine Books, and Harvard University Press for over 30 years.

Tara has published fiction, poetry, and essays (Confrontation, The Caribbean Writer, Hayden’​​s Ferry Review, The Baltimore Review, Pleiades, Five Points, Natural Bridge). Her essays have been read on NPR and translated into dance, and nonfiction articles appear in Electric Lit, Huffington Post, Psychology Today, and CRAFT.

She was a regular contributor to the Indian-American and Masala magazines, in which her essays on the topic of race and culture were often featured. She appears in A Directory of American Poets and Fiction Writers; Who’s Who in America; Who’s Who of American Women; and received the 2018 Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award and the 2019 Inspirational Woman in Literature Award. She has served on the advisory board for the Robert Frost Foundation, and judged the annual Soul-Making Literary Competition’s Intercultural Essay Contest (which she founded in 2006) sponsored by the San Francisco branch of the National League of American Pen Women. She is also a Founding Donor to the Harry Ransom Center's Flash Fiction Collection at the University of Texas at Austin and currently serves on the editorial board of Terrain.org (the world's first place-based online journal).

Much of her writing is set within the framework of nature and place, a result of the years she spent outdoors in the woods and on the shores of Long Island Sound. She LOVES history, flowers, anything vintage, the beach, the marshes, chocolate, and family time. 

She now lives near the Twelve Mile Swamp in St. Augustine, Florida.