Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in 1977 and grew up in Nigeria. She moved to the United States to attend college and majored in communication and political science. In 2002, she was short-listed for the Caine Prize for African Writing. Her fiction has been published in literary journals including the Iowa Review, Prism International, Other Voices, Zoetrope All-Story, Calyx, and Wasafiri. Her stories have also been selected for Commonwealth Broadcasting Association and BBC awards. Purple Hibiscus, her first novel, will be published by Algonquin in October 2003. She is presently a student in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.