Vanessa M. Gezari

Vanessa M. Gezari writes about national and international affairs with a focus on Afghanistan, South Asia and West Africa. She was a national writer for the St. Petersburg Times in Florida for more than three years, traveling the Gulf Coast to document the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and reporting on disaster, terrorism and human resilience from Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Russia and England. In 2007, she traveled to Liberia on an International Reporting Project fellowship to write about the psychic residue of total war.

Previously, she freelanced from New Delhi and Kabul for nearly three years, covering Afghanistan on assignment for the Chicago Tribune from 2002-2003 and training Afghan journalists with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting in 2004. She has written for The Washington Post Sunday Magazine, Slate and the Los Angeles Times, mentored journalists in Liberia and worked as a long-distance mentor to reporters from Pajwhok Afghan News, where she continues to volunteer. She has a B.A. in English from Yale and is writing a book about Afghanistan.

Past work:

• Where to now? 2008 was a spectacular year for women in politics. But the reality is that the race has just begun. The Washington Post
• Pakistan under pressure: Militants are gaining territory – and strength – with astonishing speed Slate
• Cracking Open: Michael Short knows he was wrong to sell crack cocaine, but he questions whether he needed 15 years in prison to learn his lesson. Now some of the politicians who helped put him there are wondering, too. The Washington Post
• Losing hope: What happened to Afghanistan’s stubborn optimism? Slate
• Killing our fathers, raising our sons: Thousands of child soldiers tread an uneasy middle ground in Liberia, a country torn between learning from its past or forgetting it in trying to build a future amid utter ruin St. Petersburg Times
• Liberia recovers from war Slate