S.A. Yoder Memorial Lecture: Sofia Samatar, author

Sofia Samatar is a writer of fiction and nonfiction, including the memoir The White Mosque, a PEN/Jean Stein Award finalist. Her works range from the award-winning epic fantasy A Stranger in Olondria to Opacities, a nonfiction book about writing, publishing, and friendship.

Samatar’s essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in Conjunctions, The New Inquiry, The Paris Review Daily, Obsidian, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Uncanny Magazine, The White Review, North American Review, Research in African Literatures, and elsewhere. Her work has been translated into eleven languages. She holds a PhD in African Languages and Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she studied modern Arabic literature and wrote a dissertation on the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih.

Sofia Samatar lives in Virginia and teaches African literature, Arabic literature, and speculative fiction at James Madison University, where she is Roop Distinguished Professor of English.