Maggie Messitt is an American writer and editor focused on narrative and immersion journalism in middle America & southern Africa. She lived in rural Africa for more than six years and split her life between two continents for two more. She returned to the US as a full-time resident in early 2011.
Maggie currently resides in Athens, OH, where she's a doctoral fellow in Creative Writing at Ohio University. When she's not teaching or working on her next manuscript, she continues to write/report for regional and national publications.
Maggie lived in Limpopo, South Africa, from 2003-2011 (6yrs full-time, 2yrs part-time), during which time she was the Founding Director of Amazwi, a non-profit storytelling initiative and writing school for African women, editor of it's community newspaper and magazine, and a freelance international correspondent. When she gets back to southern Africa, Maggie reports from rural communities in Mozambique, Swaziland, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. She also continues her work as a media educator and newspaper consultant in underserved regions.
Maggie has a BA in Journalism & Faith, Peace, and Justice (an interdisciplinary human rights program) from Boston College; a secondary English Education certificate from San Francisco State University; a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction from Goucher College; and a forthcoming graduate certificate in Manuscript Editing from the University of Chicago. She was also a 2010 Multimedia Storytelling Fellow at the Knight Digital Media Center (University of California, Berkeley).
