Chinelo Okparanta

Chinelo Okparanta was born and raised in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, and currently teaches at Swarthmore College.  She is the author of Happiness, Like Water and Under the Udala Trees. Her honors include an O. Henry Prize and finalist selections for the International DUBLIN Literary Award, the NAACP Image Award in Fiction, and the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award, among others. In 2017, Okparanta was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists, and in 2018, she was selected to serve as a fiction judge for the U.S. National Book Awards. Her second novel, Harry Sylvester Bird, is forthcoming from Mariner in July 2022.