“Right after undergrad, I started doing low-level work on health issues in sub-Saharan Africa, and what struck me was the disconnect between how people in New York would speak about some of the issues people were facing. At the time, 2006-ish, there were a number of big media campaigns to raise awareness about HIV in sub-Saharan Africa.”

Nigerian-American author and medical doctor

Uzodinma Iweala is a Nigerian-American author and medical doctor. He is known for his fiction and nonfiction on Nigerian life, identity, and crisis, including his debut novel, Beasts of No Nation, and later works such as Our Kind of People and Speak No Evil. Beasts of No Nation grew out of his thesis work at Harvard and follows a child soldier in an unnamed African country. Published in 2005 and later adapted into an award-winning film in 2015, it drew attention from major outlets including Time, The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, The Times, and Rolling Stone. In 2012, he published Our Kind of People, a nonfiction book about the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Nigeria, and in 2018 he released Speak No Evil, which centers on the life of a gay Nigerian-American boy named Niru.