Maaza Mengiste is an Ethiopian American author of literary fiction best known as the author of “Beneath the Lion’s Gaze” and “The Shadow King.” She was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1974 but left the country when she was four years old. She would live in Nigeria and Kenya before relocating to the United States. In the US, she attended New York University and got her Creative Writing MFA. Mengiste proved herself quite the scholar as she got a Fulbright Scholarship, was nominated for the Pushcart Prize and had her work featured in the likes of “The Granta Anthology of the African Short Story,” “The New York Times,” and the “Callaloo Journal.”
Books in order of publication:
Standalone Novels
| Beneath the Lion’s Gaze | (2010) | |
| The Shadow King | (2019) |
Oak Lawn Library Friends 