About the AUTHOR
I write (mostly) novels. So far, each one has been about searching for one’s place in the world, which, when I think about it, is what I’ve been doing for most of my life. My earliest memories are of being washed with other babies in Senegal’s Casamance river, where my parents were conducting ethnographic fieldwork and only my white skin set me apart. Even though children in the village died quite regularly (of malaria, and scorpion stings, and drowning, and…), I never felt lonely or afraid when we lived with the Mandinko; it was only when we returned to rural Vermont so that I could start first grade that I experienced the emptiness of unbelonging.
