NoViolet Bulawayo is the author of We Need New Names, which has been recognized with the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the Pen/Hemingway Award, the LA Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Etisalat Prize for Literature, and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the International Literature Award, and the Guardian First Book Award. NoViolet earned her MFA at Cornell University where she was a recipient of the Truman Capote Fellowship. She has taught fiction writing at Cornell and Stanford Universities. NoViolet grew up in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe.