Laila Lalami was born and raised in Morocco. Her work has appeared in the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a British Council Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship. She was short-listed for the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2006. Her debut collection of short stories, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill), was published in 2005 and has since been translated into six languages. Her first novel, Secret Son, was published by Algonquin in spring 2009. She is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside.