M. Tabar worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in Gabon and then on USAID and State Department-funded assistance projects in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Jordan, the Ivory Coast, Mali, Niger, Cameroon, Sri Lanka, Togo, and Haiti. She is an alumnus of the Universities of Oregon and Georgetown, where she studied anthropology, communications, and foreign languages, with a focus on the Middle East and Francophone Africa. She lives in West Africa with her family, where she is working on an aid program and revising a memoir on the forever wars.