Black Excellence: Maaza Mengiste
https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-2026/maaza-mengiste
Maaza Mengiste is a fiction writer depicting the moral and personal harms of political conflict in works that render both the intimate textures of individuals’ lives and the broad sweep of historical events unfolding around them. She grounds her novels in extensive research and inhabits multiple historical and fictional voices, offering complex, sometimes competing, accounts of periods of violence in twentieth-century Ethiopia.