Matthew Davis is the founding director of the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center at George Mason University. He’s the author of When Things Get Dark: A Mongolian Winter’s Tale. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic and Guernica, among other places. He has been an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America, a Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute at UNLV, and a Fulbright Fellow to Syria and Jordan.