Masha Hamilton
Masha Hamilton is the author of five novels: Staircase of a Thousand Steps, (2001) a Booksense pick by independent booksellers and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection; The Distance Between Us, (2004) named one of the best books of the year by Library Journal, The Camel Bookmobile, (2007) also a Booksense pick, and 31 Hours, named by the Washington Post as one of the best books of 2009. Her latest novel, What Changes Everything, comes out in May 2013.
Currently serving as the Director of Communications and Public Diplomacy at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, she worked as a foreign correspondent for The Associated Press for five years in the Middle East, where she covered the intefadeh, the peace process and the partial Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon. She also spent five years in Moscow, where she was a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, wrote a newspaper column, “Postcard from Moscow,” and reported for NBC/Mutual Radio. She reported from Afghanistan in 2004 and in 2006, she traveled in Kenya to research The Camel Bookmobile and to interview street kids in Nairobi and drought and famine victims in the isolated northeast.
She has founded two non-profits, the Camel Book Drive to supply books to children in northeastern Kenya, and the Afghan Women's Writing Project, to support the voices of Afghan women. A Brown University graduate, she has been awarded fiction fellowships from Yaddo, Blue Mountain Center, Squaw Valley Community of Writers and the Arizona Commission on the Arts. She has taught for Gotham Writers’ Workshop, at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, and in numerous other settings. She is a licensed shiatsu practitioner and is currently studying nuad phaen boran, Thai traditional massage.
“The stories she'd read of others' lives over these last few months had left her with a greater appreciation for the thread of her own life.”
“I'll be back," she said. "Very soon."He needed to reply. He needed to say Good, come back; better, Don't go; or better still, I'll join you. He wanted to say, Your neck is beautiful. He wanted to say, I never ever thought my life would hold this, and if your leaving is what I must give for what I was given, then it was worth it.But the children were all around and Mr Abasi was calling out and motioning for her to come, and anyway, he knew now, if he hadn't known before, that there were limitations to words - words in the air or on a page.”
“Have you heard," he said "that many of our people believe if you know five colloquial expressions in their tribal language, they must always provide you with nourishment and shelter? But-" He paused as though to make sure she was paying attention. "But if you know fewer than five, they owe you not even a sip of water."She nodded, understanding his point, but he pressed it."Learn those five phrases, Miss Sweeney," he said.”
“I realized right away that books could take us out of ourselves, and make us larger. Even provide us with human connections we wouldn’t otherwise have.”
“If I have to stay my whole life here, without ever experiencing there, I’ll evaporate.”
“But then, with whatever time she had left, until life was taken from her, Neema would touch more pages; she would encounter there more of those far-flung sisters; she would listen to them whisper the unuttered words of her heart.”
“I think I was always interested in the larger world, even as a kid, and my experiences as a journalist only heightened that interest. Covering conflict, I learned that though leaders often try to create a sense of "us" and "them," the differences are not that delineated. I often felt like it was a whole bunch of "us," with some of "them" scattered around. That made me feel that the borders we draw around ourselves are often artificial.”
“Books allowed her vicarious tastes of infinite variety, but they didn't supplant the need to venture out into the big and the messy. In fact, just the opposite. Books convinced her that something more existed---something intuitive, beyond reason---and they whetted her appetite to find it.”