Maaza Mengiste is a novelist and essayist. Her debut novel, Beneath the Lion's Gaze, was selected by the Guardian as one of the 10 best contemporary African books and named one of the best books of 2010 by Christian Science Monitor, Boston Globe and other publications. Her fiction and nonfiction can be found in The New Yorker, Granta, the Guardian, the New York Times, BBC Radio and Lettre International, among other places. She is a Fulbright Scholar and was awarded Runner-up in the 2011 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Maaza writes fiction and nonfiction dealing with conflict, migration, the relationship between photography and violence. She was a writer on the documentary project, GIRL RISING and recently completed work on another documentary film, THE INVISIBLE CITY, which focuses on unaccompanied children refugees living in Kakuma, one of the world's largest refugee camps, located in Kenya. Her second novel, set during the Fascist invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, is forthcoming.
