Aminatta Forna
Aminatta’s books have been translated into eighteen languages. Her essays have appeared in Freeman’s, Granta, The Guardian, LitHub, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The Observer and Vogue. She has written stories for BBC radio and written and presented television documentaries including “The Lost Libraries of Timbuktu” (BBC Television, 2009) and “Girl Rising” (CNN, 2013).
Aminatta is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the Folio Academy. She has acted as judge for the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Bailey Prize for Women’s Fiction, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, the Caine Prize and the International Man Booker Prize.
In 2003 Aminatta established the Rogbonko Project to build a school in a village in Sierra
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Reem Gaafar is a Sudanese public health physician, researcher, writer and mother of three boys. She is published in both fiction and non-fiction circles, contributing to issues on public health and policy, society, racism and women’s rights. Her work has appeared in African Arguments, 500 Words Magazine, Teakisi Magazine, African Feminism, Andariya Magazine, International Health Policies and Health Systems Global.
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Her short story Light of the Desert was published in the anthology I Know Two Sudans (Gipping Press, UK). Her second short short Finding Descartes was published in the anthology Relations: African and Diaspora Voices (HarperVia). Her debut novel A Mouth Full of Salt (Saqi Books, Invisible Books) won The Island Prize in 2023, was li -
Kristin Vukovic
Kristin Vuković has written for the New York Times, BBC Travel, Travel + Leisure, Coastal Living, Virtuoso, The Magazine, Hemispheres, the Daily Beast, AFAR, Connecticut Review, and Public Books, among others. An early excerpt of her novel was longlisted for the Cosmonauts Avenue Inaugural Fiction Prize. She was named a “40 Under 40” honoree by the National Federation of Croatian Americans Cultural Foundation, and received a Zlatna Penkala (Golden Pen) award for her writing about Croatia. Kristin holds a BA in literature and writing and an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University, and was Editor-in-Chief of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. She grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota and currently resides in New York City with he
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Priscilla Morris
Priscilla Morris is a British author of Cornish-Bosnian parentage, who lives in Monaghan, Ireland. She grew up in London, spending her childhood summers in Sarajevo. Black Butterflies, her debut novel, was inspired by family history and tells one woman's story of disintegration, loss, resilience and hope. When not writing, Priscilla teaches creative writing online and runs writing retreats in Catalonia. Find out more on www.priscillamorris.org
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I wrote my debut novel BLACK BUTTERFLIES (2022) to understand the siege that devastated Sarajevo from 1992-1996. It turned many of my maternal relatives, including my grandparents, into refugees. It's inspired by their stories and, in particular, by the extraordinary tale of my great-uncle, the Bosn -
Peace Adzo Medie
Peace Adzo Medie is a Ghanaian writer and senior lecturer in gender and international politics at the University of Bristol in England. Prior to that she was a research fellow at the University of Ghana. She has published several short stories, and her book Global Norms and Local Action: The Campaigns to End Violence Against Women in Africa was published by Oxford University Press in 2020. She is an award-winning scholar and has been awarded several fellowships. She holds a PhD in public and international affairs from the University of Pittsburgh and a BA in geography from the University of Ghana. She was born in Liberia.
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Abi Daré
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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Abi Daré grew up in Lagos, Nigeria and has lived in the UK for eighteen years. She studied law at the University of Wolverhampton and has an M.Sc. in International Project Management from Glasgow Caledonian University as well as an MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck University of London. The Girl with the Louding Voice won The Bath Novel Award for unpublished manuscripts in 2018 and was also selected as a finalist in 2018 The Literary Consultancy Pen Factor competition. Abi lives in Essex with her husband and two daughters, who inspired her to write her debut novel. -
Shubhangi Swarup
Shubhangi Swarup is a journalist and educationist. She was awarded the Charles Pick Fellowship for Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, and has also won awards for gender sensitivity in feature writing. She lives in Mumbai.
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Namina Forna
Namina Forna is a young adult novelist and the author of the New York Times bestselling fantasy YA series The Gilded Ones. Originally from Sierra Leone, West Africa, she moved to the US when she was nine and has been traveling back and forth ever since.
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Namina's books have been translated into 25+ languages, nominated for several awards, and optioned for film and TV. Namina herself is an accomplished public speaker, especially on the topics of feminism, storytelling and challenging dominant narratives. -
Margaret Verble
Margaret Verble, an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, has set her novel on her family’s Indian allotment land near Ft. Gibson, OK. She currently lives in Lexington, Kentucky.
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Verble is a successful business woman and novelist. Her consulting work has taken her to most states and to several foreign countries. Upon the publication of her debut novel, Maud’s Line, Margaret whittled her consulting practice down to one group of clients, organ procurement organizations, tissue banks, and eye banks, to devote the rest of her time to writing. Maud’s Line is a Finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. -
Sara Nović
Sara Nović is author of the NYT best-seller TRUE BIZ, as well as the novel GIRL AT WAR, (2015, winner American Library Association Alex Award, longlist Women's Prize, finalist for the LA Times Fiction prize) and the illustrated nonfiction collection AMERICA IS IMMIGRANTS (2019). She's an instructor of creative writing and Deaf studies, and lives in Philly with her family.
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Visit her on the web at http://sara-novic.com or
[twitter] @novicsara
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Chibundu Onuzo
Chibundu Onuzo was born in Nigeria in 1991 in Lagos and is the youngest of four children. She is a History graduate from King's College London and is currently an MSc student in Public Policy at the University College of London.
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(from http://freduagyeman.blogspot.com/2013...) -
Ellen Banda-Aaku
Ellen Banda-Aaku was born in Woking Surrey in 1965. The middle child of three she grew up in Zambia and has lived and worked in Ghana, South Africa, the UK and Zambia.
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In 2004 she won the Macmillan Writers’ Prize for Africa for Wandi’s Little Voice, a book for children. In 2007, her short story, Sozi’s Box, was the overall winner of the 2007 Commonwealth Short Story Competition. Her novel "Patchwork," published 2011, won the Penguin Prize for African Writing.
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Amit Majmudar
Amit Majmudar is the author of The Abundance, Partitions, chosen by Kirkus Reviews as one of the best debut novels of 2011 and by Booklist as one of the year’s ten best works of historical fiction. His poetry has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Best American Poetry 2011. A radiologist, he lives in Columbus, Ohio.
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William Kamkwamba
William Kamkwamba was born August 5, 1987 in Malawi, and grew up on his family farm in Wimbe, two and half hours northeast of Malawi’s capital city. William was educated at Wimbe Primary School, completing 8th grade and was then accepted to secondary school. Due to severe famine in 2001-2002, his family lacked funds to pay $80 in school fees and William was forced to drop out in his freshman year. For five years he was unable to go to school. Rather than accept his fate, William borrowed books from a small community lending library, including an American textbook Using Energy, which depicted a wind turbine. He decided to build a windmill to power his family’s home. First he built a prototype, then his initial 5-meter windmill out of a broke
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Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani
Adaobi Tricia Obinne Nwaubani (born in 1976) is a Nigerian novelist, humorist, essayist and journalist. Her debut novel, I Do Not Come to you by Chance, won the 2010 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book (Africa), a Betty Trask First Book award,and was named by the Washington Post as one of the Best Books of 2009. Nwaubani is the first contemporary African writer on the global stage to have got an international book deal while still living in her home country.
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Sofi Oksanen
Sofi Oksanen was born in Finland to a Finnish father and an Estonian mother. In 2010 she won the Nordic Council's Literature Prize for her third novel (originally a play), Puhdistus (Purge).
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Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin published twenty-two novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received many awards: Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, PEN-Malamud, etc. Her recent publications include the novel Lavinia, an essay collection, Cheek by Jowl, and The Wild Girls. She lived in Portland, Oregon.
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She was known for her treatment of gender (The Left Hand of Darkness, The Matter of Seggri), political systems (The Telling, The Dispossessed) and difference/otherness in any other form. Her interest in non-Western philosophies was reflected in works such as "Solitude" and The Telling but even more interesting are her imagined societies, often mi -
Kei Miller
Kei Miller was born in Jamaica in 1978. He completed an MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and a PhD in English literature at the University of Glasgow. He works in multiple genres - poetry, fiction and non-fiction and has won major prizes across these genres. He won the Forward Prize for poetry and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. He has taught at the Universities of Glasgow, London, and Exeter. He is presently Professor of English at the University of Miami.
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Yiyun Li
Yiyun Li is the author of seven books, including Where Reasons End, which received the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award; the essay collection Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life; and the novels The Vagrants and Must I Go. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, and Windham-Campbell Prize, among other honors. A contributing editor to A Public Space, she teaches at Princeton University.
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Tsitsi Dangarembga
Spent part of her childhood in England. She began her education there, but concluded her A-levels in a missionary school back home, in the town of Mutare. She later studied medicine at Cambridge University, but became homesick and returned home as Zimbabwe's black-majority rule began in 1980.
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She took up psychology at the University of Zimbabwe, of whose drama group she was a member. She also held down a two-year job as a copywriter at a marketing agency. This early writing experience gave her an avenue for expression: she wrote numerous plays, such as The Lost of the Soil, and then joined the theatre group Zambuko, and participated in the production of two plays, Katshaa and Mavambo.
In 1985, Dangarembga published a short story in Sweden cal -
Laila Lalami
Laila Lalami is the author of five books, including The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab-American Book Award, and the Hurston Wright Legacy Award. It was on the longlist for the Booker Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Her most recent novel, The Other Americans, was a national bestseller, won the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. Her books have been translated into twenty languages. She has been awarded fellowships from the British Council, the Fulbright Program, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. She lives in Los Angeles.
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Ishmael Beah
Ishmael Beah was born in Sierra Leone in 1980. He moved to the United States in 1998 and finished his last two years of high school at the United Nations International School in New York. In 2004 he graduated from Oberlin College with a B.A. in political science.
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He is a member of the Human Rights Watch Children’s Rights Division Advisory Committee and has spoken before the United Nations, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities (CETO) at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, and many other NGO panels on children affected by the war. His work has appeared in VespertinePress and LIT magazine. He lives in New York City.
http://us.macmillan.com/author/ishmae... -
Kurban Said
Lev Nussimbaum (1905 - 1942) was a prolific Jewish writer who reinvented himself as a Muslim under the pseudonyms Essad Bey and Kurban Said. Despite his being an ethnic Jew, his politics were such that, before his origins were discovered, the Nazi propaganda ministry included his works on their list of "excellent books for German minds".
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Zora Neale Hurston
Novels, including Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and nonfiction writings of American folklorist Zora Neale Hurston give detailed accounts of African American life in the South.
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In 1925, Hurston, one of the leaders of the literary renaissance, happening in Harlem, produced the short-lived literary magazine Fire!! alongside Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman shortly before she entered Barnard College. This literary movement developed into the Harlem renaissance.
Hurston applied her Barnard ethnographic training to document African American folklore in her critically acclaimed book Mules and Men alongside fiction Their Eyes Were Watching God . She also assembled a folk-based performance dance group that recreated her Southern t -
Reem Gaafar
Reem Gaafar is a Sudanese public health physician, researcher, writer and mother of three boys. She is published in both fiction and non-fiction circles, contributing to issues on public health and policy, society, racism and women’s rights. Her work has appeared in African Arguments, 500 Words Magazine, Teakisi Magazine, African Feminism, Andariya Magazine, International Health Policies and Health Systems Global.
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Her short story Light of the Desert was published in the anthology I Know Two Sudans (Gipping Press, UK). Her second short short Finding Descartes was published in the anthology Relations: African and Diaspora Voices (HarperVia). Her debut novel A Mouth Full of Salt (Saqi Books, Invisible Books) won The Island Prize in 2023, was li -
Chris Cleave
Dr Chris Cleave is a New York Times #1 bestselling novelist, a chartered psychologist and a psychotherapist. He writes a weekly piece on humanity and healing at http://chriscleave.substack.com
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Chris was born in London and spent his early years in Cameroon. His novels are:
INCENDIARY
LITTLE BEE
(THE OTHER HAND)
GOLD
EVERYONE BRAVE IS FORGIVEN
He lives in London with his wife and some of their three adult children.
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Bruce Barcott
Bruce Barcott is an American editor, environmental journalist and author. He is a contributing editor of Outside and has written articles for The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Mother Jones, Sports Illustrated, Harper's Magazine, Legal Affairs, Utne Reader and others. He has also written a number of books including, The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier (1997) and The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman's Fight to Save the World's Most Beautiful Bird (2008). In 2009 he was named a Guggenheim Fellow in nonfiction.
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Deborah Rodriguez
Deborah Rodriguez is a hairdresser, a motivational speaker, and the author of the bestselling memoir Kabul Beauty School.
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She spent five years teaching at and later directing the Kabul Beauty School, the first modern beauty academy and training salon in Afghanistan. Rodriguez also owned the Oasis Salon and the Cabul Coffee House.
She currently lives in Mexico. -
Matthew Thomas
Matthew Thomas was born and raised in New York City. A graduate of the University of Chicago, he has an MA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and an MFA from the University of California, Irvine. His New York Times-bestselling novel WE ARE NOT OURSELVES has been shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the James Tait Black Prize, and the John Gardner Fiction Book Award, longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, the Guardian First Book Award, and the Folio Prize, named a New York Times Notable Book, and named one of the best fiction books of 2014 by the Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, Esquire, Publishers Weekly, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Apple, and others.
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Selçuk Altun
Selçuk Altun (born 1950) is a Turkish writer, publisher and retired banking executive.
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Born in Artvin, Turkey in 1950, he graduated from the Management Department of Boğaziçi University. He began work in the finance sector in 1974 and was chairman of Yapi Kredi Bank and executive board director of the YKY (Yapı Kredi Publications), where he amassed a personal library of 9,000 volumes and published works by Louise Glück and John Ashbery, before he retired in 2004 to pursue his full timewriting career.
“My goal was to write a book by the age of 50,” he says. “Before that, I knew I needed to read, so I read some 4,000 books before I sat down to write. That, more than anything, gave me the confidence I needed.” His first novel Yalnızlık Gittiğin -
Ellen Banda-Aaku
Ellen Banda-Aaku was born in Woking Surrey in 1965. The middle child of three she grew up in Zambia and has lived and worked in Ghana, South Africa, the UK and Zambia.
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In 2004 she won the Macmillan Writers’ Prize for Africa for Wandi’s Little Voice, a book for children. In 2007, her short story, Sozi’s Box, was the overall winner of the 2007 Commonwealth Short Story Competition. Her novel "Patchwork," published 2011, won the Penguin Prize for African Writing.
She has a BA in Public Administration from the University of Zambia, an MA in Financial Management with Social Policy from Middlesex University and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. She’s currently is based in the UK where she lives with her two children Saada -
Sara Nović
Sara Nović is author of the NYT best-seller TRUE BIZ, as well as the novel GIRL AT WAR, (2015, winner American Library Association Alex Award, longlist Women's Prize, finalist for the LA Times Fiction prize) and the illustrated nonfiction collection AMERICA IS IMMIGRANTS (2019). She's an instructor of creative writing and Deaf studies, and lives in Philly with her family.
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Visit her on the web at http://sara-novic.com or
[twitter] @novicsara
[insta] @photonovic -
Shubhangi Swarup
Shubhangi Swarup is a journalist and educationist. She was awarded the Charles Pick Fellowship for Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, and has also won awards for gender sensitivity in feature writing. She lives in Mumbai.
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Amit Majmudar
Amit Majmudar is the author of The Abundance, Partitions, chosen by Kirkus Reviews as one of the best debut novels of 2011 and by Booklist as one of the year’s ten best works of historical fiction. His poetry has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Best American Poetry 2011. A radiologist, he lives in Columbus, Ohio.
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Priscilla Morris
Priscilla Morris is a British author of Cornish-Bosnian parentage, who lives in Monaghan, Ireland. She grew up in London, spending her childhood summers in Sarajevo. Black Butterflies, her debut novel, was inspired by family history and tells one woman's story of disintegration, loss, resilience and hope. When not writing, Priscilla teaches creative writing online and runs writing retreats in Catalonia. Find out more on www.priscillamorris.org
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I wrote my debut novel BLACK BUTTERFLIES (2022) to understand the siege that devastated Sarajevo from 1992-1996. It turned many of my maternal relatives, including my grandparents, into refugees. It's inspired by their stories and, in particular, by the extraordinary tale of my great-uncle, the Bosn -
James A. Michener
James Albert Michener is best known for his sweeping multi-generation historical fiction sagas, usually focusing on and titled after a particular geographical region. His first novel, Tales of the South Pacific , which inspired the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific, won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
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Toward the end of his life, he created the Journey Prize, awarded annually for the year's best short story published by an emerging Canadian writer; founded an MFA program now, named the Michener Center for Writers, at the University of Texas at Austin; and made substantial contributions to the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, best known for its permanent collection of Pennsylvania Impressionist pain -
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Laila Lalami
Laila Lalami is the author of five books, including The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab-American Book Award, and the Hurston Wright Legacy Award. It was on the longlist for the Booker Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Her most recent novel, The Other Americans, was a national bestseller, won the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. Her books have been translated into twenty languages. She has been awarded fellowships from the British Council, the Fulbright Program, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. She lives in Los Angeles.
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Betty Miller
Betty Miller (1910-65), was born in Ireland to a Lithuanian businessman and a Swedish teacher whose (Polish) family was distantly related to the philosopher Henri Bergson. She went to school in London and did a diploma in journalism at University College before publishing the first of her seven novels. In 1933 she married the psychiatrist Emanuel Miller (1892-1970) and then wrote two more well-received novels and Farewell Leicester Square (unpublished until 1941). During the war she lived in the country with her children, Jonathan (b.1934) and Sarah (b.1937), writing On the Side of the Angels (1945, repr. 1985) and a biography of Robert Browning (1952). Her London circle included Olivia Manning, Stevie Smith, Marghanita Laski and Isaiah Ber
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Edna Adan Ismail
Edna Adan Ismail (Somali: Edna Aadan Ismaaciil ama Adna Aadan Ismaaciil) is a nurse midwife, activist and was the first female Foreign Minister of Somaliland from 2003 to 2006. She previously served as Somaliland's Minister of Family Welfare and Social Development.
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She is the director and founder of the Edna Adan Maternity Hospital in Hargeisa and an activist and pioneer in the struggle for the abolition of female genital mutilation. She is also President of the Organization for Victims of Torture.
She was married to Mohamed Haji Ibrahim Egal who was the prime minister of the State of Somaliland five days prior to Trust Territory of Somalia's independence and later the Somali Republic (1960-1960) and (1967–69) and President of Somaliland (199 -
Kristin Vukovic
Kristin Vuković has written for the New York Times, BBC Travel, Travel + Leisure, Coastal Living, Virtuoso, The Magazine, Hemispheres, the Daily Beast, AFAR, Connecticut Review, and Public Books, among others. An early excerpt of her novel was longlisted for the Cosmonauts Avenue Inaugural Fiction Prize. She was named a “40 Under 40” honoree by the National Federation of Croatian Americans Cultural Foundation, and received a Zlatna Penkala (Golden Pen) award for her writing about Croatia. Kristin holds a BA in literature and writing and an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University, and was Editor-in-Chief of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. She grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota and currently resides in New York City with he
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