Maggie Messitt

Maggie Messitt is the author of The Rainy Season: Three Lives in the New South Africa, longlisted for the 2016 Sunday Times Alan Paton Award in South Africa, where she was a journalist and editor for eight years. Since returning to the United States, her essays and reportage have been published in Creative NonfictionMother JonesRiver Teeth, and the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance magazine, among others. She was awarded honorable mention in the 2013 Documentary Essay Prize competition of Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, and her work for Wisconsin Public Television and PBS’s POV documentary film series earned her a 2010 Multimedia Storytelling fellowship from the Knight Digital Media Center at the University of California, Berkeley. More recently, Messitt was a 2015 Kenyon Review Peter Taylor Fellow, Scholar-in-Residence at Bowers Writers House, Truman State University’s 2016 Clayton B. Ofstad Endowed Writer-in-Residence, and nonfiction judge for the 2017 Oregon Literary Fellowships. She now teaches in the MFA program at Goucher College and is the national director of Report for America.

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