Marra attended the Landon School in Bethesda, Maryland[5] before attending the University of Southern California where he earned with bachelor's degree in creative writing.[6] He received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writer's Workshop. Between 2011 and 2013, he was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University,[7] where he also taught as the Jones Lecturer in Fiction.[3]
Marra has also received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation[8] and the National Endowment for the Arts.[2][9]
