A native of Berkeley, California, Maura Fitzgerald has traveled independently in more than fifty countries on five continents. Along the way, she researched West African diaspora communities in Paris, taught first grade in the New Orleans public schools, worked with asylum seekers in San Francisco, and learned six languages. Her photographs and writing have appeared in publications including The Oxford American, Southern Cultures, Guernica Daily, and The Harvard Divinity Bulletin.

 

Maura is a graduate of the Master in Public Policy program at the Harvard Kennedy School, where her research focused on migration, inequality, and child welfare. She also earned a B.A., summa cum laude with distinction in the History major, from Yale University; her senior thesis -- which traced the history of jazz parades in New Orleans as exuberant resistance to racial oppression from slavery to the present -- was awarded the White Prize in American history, the Pickens Prize in African-American history, and the Wrexham Prize for best undergraduate thesis in the humanities.