Masha Hamilton

Masha Hamilton is the author of five acclaimed novels, most recently What Changes Everything, published in June 2013. 31 HOURS (Unbridled Books, 2009), an Indie Choice pick by independent booksellers, was called "gorgeous and complex." by Publishers Weekly. "You don't just read this gut-wrenching book; you become part of it in a deep, primal way," wrote StyleSubstanceSoul.com founder Lois Alter Mark. Hamilton is also the founder of two world literacy programs: the Camel Book Drive, begun in 2007 to supply a camel-borne library in northeastern Kenya, and the Afghan Women's Writing Project, begun in 2009 to foster creative and intellectual exchange between Afghan women writers and American women authors and teachers.

Her previous novels include Staircase of a Thousand Steps (2001), a Booksense pick by independent booksellers and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection; The Distance Between Us (Unbridled Books, 2004), named one of the best books of the year by Library Journal; and The Camel Bookmobile (2007), also a Booksense pick. Booksense called it an excellent book club selection, and the New York Times said: "Hamilton makes us see how much is really at stake in a poverty-stricken place where every possession carries the weight of significance."

She worked for 18 months in Afghanistan in 2012-2013 as Director of Communications and Public Diplomacy, and from 2013-2015 as Vice President of Communications for Concern Worldwide. She was a foreign correspondent for The Associated Press for five years in the Middle East, where she covered the intefadeh, the peace process and the partial Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon. Then she spent five years in Moscow, where she was a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, wrote a newspaper column, Postcard from Moscow, and reported for NBC/Mutual Radio. She wrote about Kremlin politics as well as life for average Russians under Gorbachev and Yeltsin during the coup and collapse of the Soviet Union. She reported from Afghanistan in 2004, and returned in 2008. In 2006, she traveled in Kenya to research The Camel Bookmobile and to interview street kids in Nairobi and drought and famine victims in the isolated northeast.

A Brown University graduate, she has been awarded fiction fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Maison Dora Maar, Blue Mountain Center, Headlands Center for the Arts, Squaw Valley Community of Writers and the Arizona Commission on the Arts. She teaches for Gotham Writers' Workshop and has also taught at the 92nd Street Y in New York City and at a number of writers' workshops around the country. She is a licensed shiatsu practitioner and lives with her family in Brooklyn.