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When Fiction Tells the Truest Truth: a conversation between journalist Alex Kotlowitz and novelist Maaza Mengiste

Join The Center for the Writing Arts' writer-in-residence, Alex Kotlowitz, as he has a lively conversation with internation writer and documentarian Maaza Mengiste for his annual winter event. Mengiste will be coming to Northwestern as the visiting-writer-in-residence for the CWA to teach the art of fiction spring quarter 2015.

Alex Kotlowitz, CWA Writer in Residence for Winter Quarter 2014. Award-winning author of There Are No Children Here, The Other Side of the River, and Never a City So Real. Contributor to The New York Times Magazine and public radio’s This American Life. For his documentary film The Interrupters, which premiered at Sundance, he received an Emmy and Indpendent Spirit Film Award. Alex Kotlowitz is renowned for his narratives of individuals whose life experiences illuminate broad aspects of our nation’s social and political landscape.

Maaza Mengiste is a Fulbright Scholar and the award-winning author of Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, selected by the Guardian as one of the 10 best contemporary African books. The novel was named one of the best books of 2010 by Christian Science Monitor, Boston Globe, Publishers Weekly and other publications. Her fiction and nonfiction writing can be found in the Guardian, the New York Times, BBC Radio 4, Granta, and Lettre International, among other places.

Maaza has won fellowships from Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Prague Summer Program, and the Emily Harvey Foundation. She was the 2013 Puterbaugh Fellow and a Runner-up for the 2011 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, as well as a finalist for a Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, an NAACP Image Award, and an Indies Choice Book of the Year Award in Adult Debut. Her second novel, The Shadow King, is forthcoming.