Mary Miller Chiao has won awards for historical research from the California Pioneers of Santa Clara County. Adirondack Life Magazine published her memoir of summers in the Adirondack Mountains in the 1950s, and an album of material from that time frame has been on display at the Kinnear Museum in Lake Luzerne, New York.

Her fiction appears in The California Writers Club Literary Review, Good Old Days, Writers Talk, and Carry the Light. She has won literary competitions at the San Mateo County Fair and the National League of American Pen Women, Nob Hill, San Francisco branch.

She is a member of the National League of American Pen Women, Santa Clara County Branch, the California Writers Club, both the Peninsula and South Bay Branches, and is a contributing editor to WritersTalk.

Mary resides in Northern California. Death on the Funeral Yacht, a 1950s San Francisco Mystery is her first novel. Miss Sarah Brown, Daughter of Abolitionist John Brown is a nonfiction biography of Sarah Brown based on the award-winning research of the author.