Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria in 1977. She is from Abba, in Anambra State, but grew up in the university town of Nsukka where she attended primary and secondary schools and briefly studied medicine and pharmacy. She then moved to the United States to attend college, graduating summa cum laude from Eastern Connecticut State with a major in communication and a minor in political science. She holds a masters degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University.

Her novel, Purple Hibiscus, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. It was also short-listed for the Orange Prize and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and long-listed for the Booker Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in Granta, Prospect, and the Iowa Review, among other literary journals, and she received an O. Henry Prize in 2003. She was a 2005-2006 Hodder Fellow at Princeton, where she taught introductory fiction. She is presently pursuing graduate work in the African studies program at Yale. She divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.

Greg Marinovich, born in South Africa in 1962, is a Pulitzer Prize winning photographer and co-author of The Bang Bang Club, a
non-fiction book on South Africa’s transition to democracy.

He has spent eighteen years doing conflict, documentary, and news photography around the globe. His photographs have appeared in top international publications such as Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, the Guardian (Manchester), among others. He is chair of the World Press Master Class nominating committee for Africa, and was a World Press Photo judge in 1994 and 2006, as well as convenor of the FujiFilm awards in 2000.

Marinovich is a freelance photographer and filmmaker, and is chair of the Africa World Press Masterclass committee. His work is represented by South Photographs and Corbis.

Zakes Mda is a South African writer, painter, composer, and film maker. He commutes between South Africa and the U.S., working as a professor of creative writing at Ohio University, beekeeper in the Eastern Cape, a dramaturge at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg, and a director of the Southern African Multimedia AIDS Trust in Sophiatown, Johannesburg.

Zakes Mda has received every major South African prize for his work, which includes The Heart of Redness, Ways of Dying, and She Plays with the Darkness—all published in paperback by Picador.

Mikhael Subotzky, 25, was born in Cape Town, South Africa. He has worked as a photographer since graduating from the University of Cape Town in 2004. His final-year university project, entitled Die Vier Hoeke (The Four Corners), consisted of an in-depth study of the South African prison system. It has received widespread acclaim both in South Africa and internationally, winning the 2007 Young Photographers Award at Perpignan, The 2007 KLM Paul Huf Award, The Special Jurors Award at the 2005 VIes Recontres Africaines de la Photographie in Bamako, and the 2006 F25 Award for Concerned Photography.

In 2005, Subotzky extended his focus on the criminal justice system by running photographic workshops with prisoners and photographing ex-prisoners in a series entitled Umjiegwana (The Outside). His latest project, focusing on the small Karoo Desert town of Beaufort West, will be exhibited in Cape Town, Amsterdam, and Verona later this year.

Subotzky has held solo exhibitions inside Pollsmoor Prison (2005), at the Goodman Gallery (2006), and at Constitution Hill (2006). His work has also been exhibited in Basel, Miami, Bamako, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Turin, Verona, Canary Islands, Rome, Verona, Paris, London, and New York. His prints are held in the permanent collections of the South African National Gallery (Cape Town), the Johannesburg Art Gallery, and the Museum of Modern Art (New York).

Stephanie Nolen is the Africa correspondent for the Globe and Mail, the national newspaper of Canada. Her book, 28: Stories of AIDS in Africa was published in ten countries in 2007.

She lives in Johannesburg, and has been reporting on the AIDS pandemic in Africa for the past six years. She is a six-time nominee for Canada’s National Newspaper Award, a back-to-back winner for international reporting, and a three-time winner of the Amnesty International Award for Human Rights Reporting. Visit www.28stories.com.

Photographer Sam Nzima is most famous for his iconic photograph of Hector Pieterson’s lifeless body during the 1976 Soweto Uprising. He was a staff and freelance photographer for the World newspaper during the sixties and seventies, fleeing Johannesburg in fear of police retaliation for his work.

Returning to his birthplace in Lilydale, Bushbuckridge, Nzima has become a successful small business owner and is actively involved in numerous community-building projects.

Colbert Mashile was born in 1972 in Bushbuckridge in the Mpumalanga Province of South Africa. Mashile comes from a family of teachers and was expected to join the family trend upon completion of high school. However, while studying in Pretoria, he became curious about the art that he saw in gallery windows on the city streets, leading him to the Johannesburg Art Foundation and then to a degree in fine arts from the University of the Witwatersrand. Disliking the stress of Johannesburg, Mashile has found refuge for his family in the quiet of Mpumalanga, where he can feel and experience his Africanness, letting emotions come through and discovering the truth about himself.

Mashile has risen to prominence on both national and international levels, focusing on initiation rituals and the traditions around circumcision. His recent work builds upon these themes, but is infused with the natural and mystical elements that have become part of his environment since moving back to rural Mpumalanga.

Colette Rossant was born in Paris, but raised in Egypt by her Egyptian grandparents. She returned to Paris at fifteen to complete her studies. At twenty, Colette married a young American architect and painter, moving with him to New York. Colette has always been very interested in food and fresh produce. She became a journalist for New York magazine, writing about restaurants and farmers’ markets. Later, she also wrote about her travels in places such as Bhutan, Australia, Ecuador, China, and Japan.

Colette has written ten cookbooks based on her cooking and travels. She has also published three memoirs. Colette currently splits her time between a townhouse in SoHo, New York, and an old farm house in Le Perche, France. She is currently working on a novel set in Le Perche.