Alain Mabanckou was born in Congo in 1966. An award-winning novelist, poet, and essayist, Mabanckou currently lives in Los Angeles, where he teaches literature at UCLA. He is the author of African Psycho, Broken Glass, Black Bazaar, and Tomorrow I’ll Be Twenty, as well as The Lights of Pointe-Noire, Black Moses, The Death of Comrade President, and Dealing with the Dead (The New Press). In 2015, Mabanckou was a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize.