Lara Santoro is most recently the author of Mercy, a novel. She spent most of her career as a foreign news correspondent, based primarily in Rome and in Nairobi working for Newsweek and The Christian Science Monitor. Her work has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, The Boston Globe, The London Telegraph, The Times of London and The Sunday Times. She holds a bachelor's degree in Comparative Literature from Smith College, a Master's degree in French Literature from the Sorbonne, and a Master's in Fine Arts from New York University, where she was the recipient of the Developmental Fellowship, a biannual award. She was born in Rome, and currently lives in New Mexico.