Maggie Messitt

An independent narrative and immersion journalist, MAGGIE MESSITT has spent the last decade reporting from inside underserved communities in Midwestern America and southern Africa. A dual-citizen, Messitt lived in northeastern South Africa for eight years where she was the founding director of a writing school for rural African women, editor of two publications, and a reporter. Since returning to the U.S., Messitt's reportage and essays have been published in Creative Nonfiction, Mother Jones, and the Southern Poverty Law Center's Teaching Tolerance magazine, among others. Longlisted for the 2016 Sunday Times Alan Paton Award, The Rainy Season: Three Lives in the New South Africa is her first book. // Messitt has a BA in journalism and an interdisciplinary human rights program from Boston College, an MFA from Goucher College, and (is one dissertation defense away from) a PhD in creative nonfiction at Ohio University. A 2015 Kenyon Review Peter Taylor Fellow and a 2015 Scholar-in-Residence at Bowers Writers House, Messitt is currently Truman State University’s 2016 Clayton B. Ofstad Endowed Writer-in-Residence, where she is teaching and working to complete her next book, a hybrid of investigation and memoir. // When she’s not on the road or kayaking a river somewhere, she lives in Pittsburgh, PA.