Maaza Mengiste is a Fulbright scholar, a photographer, and the award-winning author of Beneath the Lion's Gaze, selected by The Guardian as one of the ten best contemporary African books. The novel was also named one of the best books of 2010 by the Christian Science Monitor, the Boston Globe, Publishers Weekly, and other publications. Her fiction and nonfiction writing appears in The New Yorker, The Guardian, the New York Times, BBC Radio 4, Granta, and Lettre Internationale, among other places. Her second novel, The Shadow King, is forthcoming.