An independent narrative and immersion journalist, Maggie Messitt has spent the last decade reporting from inside underserved communities in Midwestern America and southern Africa. A dual-citizen, Messitt lived in northeastern South Africa for eight years where she was the founding director of a writing school for rural African women, editor of two publications, and an international reporter. Since returning to the U.S., Messitt’s reportage and essays have been published in Creative Nonfiction, Mother Jones, and the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance magazine, among others. Longlisted for the 2016 Sunday Times Alan Paton Award, The Rainy Season: Three Lives in the New South Africa is her first book.
Messitt has a BA in journalism and a human rights interdisciplinary program from Boston College, an MFA from Goucher College, and (is one dissertation defense away from) a PhD candidate in creative nonfiction at Ohio University. A 2015 Kenyon Review Peter Taylor Fellow and a 2015 Writer-in-Residence at Bowers Writers House, Messitt is teaching a creative nonfiction course at Truman this fall and working to finish her second book. When she’s not on the road or kayaking a river somewhere, she lives in Pittsburgh, PA.
More information about the Ofstad Reading Series, Maggie Messitt, and other Truman State University School of Arts and Letters’ events can be found on the School of Arts and Letters’ Facebook page: facebook.com/trumansal