My name is Alexis O'Kewo and I'm a freelance writer.

I published Austin in The New Yorker, and I'm the author of The Moonless Star-Wark Sky,

Ordinary Women and Men Fighting Extremism in Africa. These days, Alexis is a celebrated

writer. She's just published her first book and has a coveted role as a staff writer for the New Yorker.

But it hasn't always been his way. When Alexis graduated Princeton University in 2006, she was a little lost.

My senior year of college, I knew I wanted to get a job in journalism, but it was proving

pretty difficult to find a job in New York. So there was this program at my alma mater that placed recent graduates and internships across the continent of Africa.

And one of them was at a state-run newspaper in Uganda.

So I kind of applied for it blindly. I'd never been to Uganda.

But I thought it sounded interesting and I ended up getting it.

So a young 20-something, Alexis was there in Kampala. Uganda, but I thought it sounded interesting and I ended up getting it.

So a young 20-something, Alexis was there in Kampala. She was given a role of junior reporter and told to go and find stories. I had a lot of freedom to pursue all types of stories

and they let me travel around the country. It was just a really nice way to kind of learn how to be abroad, how to work abroad,

and also how to learn the grind of being on a daily newspaper,

but in a completely unexpected setting.

Once the internship had finished, Alexis stayed on.

Working in the country until months later, headed back to the US, but she'd fallen in love with East Africa. Her parents were

from the west of the continent, Nigeria, and she had grown up in Alabama, in the US, but

she'd always felt an instinctive curiosity to learn more about the continent of her

ancestors. She writes, feeling neither wholly American nor African, I came to see myself as an

outsider in both places, an observer at the fringes. It was a perspective that helped me learn

to report with clarity.

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