Ishmael Beah was born in Sierra Leone in 1980 and moved to the U.S. in 1998. In 2004 he graduated from Oberlin College with a B.A. in political science. He is a member of Human Rights Watch Children’s Division Advisory Committee, and has spoken before the United Nations, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the
Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities (CETO) at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory. Beah’s writing has appeared in VespertinePress and LIT magazine. He lives in New York City.