Mary Theresa Schmich was born in Savannah, Ga., the oldest of eight children, and spent her childhood in Georgia. She attended high school in Phoenix then earned a B.A. at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif.
After working in college admissions for three years and spending a year and a half in France, she attended journalism school at Stanford. She has worked as a reporter at the Peninsula Times Tribune in Palo Alto, Calif., at the Orlando Sentinel and, since 1985, at the Chicago Tribune. She spent five years as a Tribune national correspondent based in Atlanta.

For three years starting in 1992, she wrote a column for the Tribune. She left for a year to attend Harvard on a Nieman fellowship for journalists, then returned to the column in July 1996.

She also writes the "Brenda Starr" comic strip and plays a decent barroom piano. She lives in Chicago.