Maggie Messitt

Maggie Messitt, MFA, is the author of The Rainy Season, a work of narrative and immersion journalism set in post-apartheid South Africa, longlisted for the 2016 Sunday Times Alan Paton Award. She lived overseas for eight years during which time she was a long-form reporter, newspaper editor, and founding director of a writing school for rural African women. Since returning to the US, her essays and reportage have been published in Creative Nonfiction, Mother Jones, and the Southern Poverty Law Center's Teaching Tolerance magazine, among others. An excerpt of her first book was recognized by Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies, honored for the “best documentary writing for a long-term project,” and her work for Wisconsin Public Television and POV documentary films earned her a 2010 Multimedia Storytelling Fellowship at UC—Berkeley's Knight Digital Media Center. Most recently, Messitt was a 2015 Kenyon Review Peter Taylor Fellow, a Scholar-in-Residence at Bowers Writers House, and the 2016 Ofstad Endowed Writer in Residence at Truman State University. Editor of Proximity, a quarterly collection of true stories, Messitt has a BA in journalism and human rights from Boston College, an MFA from Goucher College, and (is one dissertation defense away from) a PhD in Creative Nonfiction from Ohio University. She teaches within the MFA programs at Carlow University (PA) and Goucher College (MD), and is finishing up her next book, a hybrid of investigation and memoir.