Author Bios

Bsrat Mezghebe is a writer from Washington, D.C. Her debut novel, I Hope You Find What You’re Looking For, released by Liveright in February 2026, delves into the secret lives of three women on the eve of Eritrean independence. Her essays about identity and migration have appeared in Guernica, The Paris Review, and the anthology Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves.  Bsrat received an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University and the Harper-Wood Creative Writing and Travel Award from Cambridge University.

Helon Habila is a Nigerian/American writer and is currently an associate professor of creative writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia as well as a contributing editor to the Virginia Quarterly Review. Habila's work The Chibok Girls: The Boko Haram Kidnappings and Islamist Militancy in Nigeria, is a nonfiction investigation into the kidnapping of 276 girls in Nigeria by Islamist militants in 2014. His first novel, Waiting for an Angel, has been translated into many languages including Dutch, Italian, Swedish, and French. His writing has won prizes including the Caine Prize; the Commonweath Writers Prize, Africa region; the Emily Balch Prize, and the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. His second novel, Measuring Time, published in 2007, won the Virginia Library Foundation Fiction Award, 2008, and was shortlisted for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. His other fiction includes Oil on Water and Travelers. Habila's stories, articles, reviews, and poems have appeared in various magazines and papers including Granta, AGNI, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Guernica, and the London Guardian. His short story, The Hotel Malogo, was selected for the Best American Non-required Reading Anthology. Habila is the editor of the Granta Book of African Short Story.