Laila Lalami was born and raised in Morocco, a place whose past and present permeate her writing. She is a unique and confident voice in the conversations about race and immigration that increasingly occupy our national attention. Her first book, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, is a fictional collection of character portraits of a group of immigrants trying to escape Morocco for a better life in Europe. Her novel The Moor’s Account won the American Book Award and the Arab American Book Award and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Her most recent novel, The Other Americans, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and the National Book Award. Lalami’s first book of nonfiction, Conditional Citizens, was named one of the best books of 2020 by The New York Times, Time, NPR, and The Los Angeles Times. She is a distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of California–Riverside.