Teju Cole, a writer, photographer, and art historian, was raised in Nigeria and came to the United States in 1992. He is the author of Every Day is for the Thief, a novella with photographs (Abuja: Cassava Republic, 2007), and Open City (New York: Random House; London: Faber and Faber, 2011), a novel that tells the story of a young Nigerian-German psychiatrist in New York City five years after 9/11. He is working on his third book, a non-fictional narrative of contemporary Lagos. From spring 2012, he will be Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College, New York.