Peter Chilson

PETER CHILSON teaches writing and literature at Washington State University. He is the author of the travelogue Riding the Demon: On the Road in West Africa (University of Georgia Press, 1999), which won the Associated Writing Programs Award in nonfiction, and the story collection Disturbance-Loving Species: A Novella and Stories (Mariner Books, 2007), winner of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Bakeless Fiction Prize and the Maria Thomas Fiction Prize. His essays, journalism, and short stories have appeared in Foreign Policy, the American Scholar, Gulf Coast, High Country News, Audubon, and Ascent, among other publications, as well as twice in the Best American Travel Writing anthology. Chilson first traveled to West Africa in 1985 as a volunteer in the Peace Corps, teaching junior high school English in the village of Bouza, Niger, near the border with Ni- geria. Chilson has been a regular visitor to West Africa ever since, working as a journalist and travel writer. He returned to Mali in 2012 for the Foreign Policy magazine-Pulitzer Center Borderlands project. He witnessed one of the tumultuous year's attempted coups in the capital of Bamako and was one of the first Western journalists to visit the country's troubled northern half and travel the border of Mali's short-lived jihadist state in the north.  See more at Peter Chilson's web site: www.peterchilson.com