Maggie Messitt

Maggie Messitt has spent the last decade reporting from inside underserved communities in southern Africa and middle America. Typically focused on complex issues through the lens of every day life, her work is deeply invested in rural regions, social justice, and environmental sustainability. Author of The Rainy Season: Three Lives in the New South Africa, Messitt lived in northeastern South Africa for 8 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 (and are forthcoming) in Creative Nonfiction, Essay Daily, Memoir Journal, Mother Jones, Narratively, Foreign Policy, Southern Living, The Rumpus, and the Southern Poverty Law Center's Teaching Tolerance magazine, among others. An excerpt of The Rainy Season 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. A 2015 Kenyon Review Peter Taylor Fellow, John Cady Graduate Research Fellow, and a Writer/Scholar-in-Residence at Bowers Writers House, Messitt is working to complete her PhD in creative nonfiction and her next book, a hybrid of investigation and memoir.