After graduating from Stanford University in 2004, she became a technology reporter for The Wall Street Journal.
[3] Vara was a technology reporter at The Wall Street Journal for almost ten years, covering Silicon Valley and California politics.
[3] She has published stories in Tin House, ZYZZYVA, and other publications, and her fiction writing has received honors from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, MacDowell, and Yaddo.
[13][14][3] In 2021, she wrote the viral piece "Ghosts", a nine-part essay about losing her older sister to cancer, using an early model of GPT-3, the AI that would become ChatGPT.
[15] Vara is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Colorado State University for 2023-24.