Alain Mabanckou is one of the world’s most widely read and acclaimed African authors writing in French. This month his memoir, The Lights of Pointe-Noire, hits bookshelves throughout America.

A poet, essayist and novelist who teaches literature at UCLA, Mabanckou was a Man Booker International Prize finalist in 2015. He is a singular and powerful voice on issues surrounding black identity and culture in the Francophone world, and was handpicked to write the preface to the French edition of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me.