Harry S. Parker III Visiting Writer: Maaza Mengiste

Maaza Mengiste is a novelist, essayist, and photographer. She is the author of the novel The Shadow King (W.W. Norton & Co, 2020), which was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize and was a 2020 LA Times Book Prize Fiction finalist. Her debut novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze (W. W. Norton & Co, 2010), 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 story “Dust, Ash, Flight,” which appeared in Addis Ababa Noir, edited by Maaza, received a 2021 Edgar Award for Best Short Story.

She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Fellowship, a Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, the Premio von Rezzori, the Premio il ponte, a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, and a Creative Capital Award. Her work can be found in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Granta, The Guardian, The New York Times, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and BBC, among other places.

Born in Ethiopia, she was raised in Nigeria, Kenya, and the United States. She is a Fulbright Scholar and a graduate of the MFA program at New York University. She teaches at Wesleyan University and lives in New York City.