Maggie Messitt is the author of The Rainy Season, a work of narrative and immersion journalism, long-listed for the 2016 Sunday Times Alan Paton Award in South Africa, where she lived and worked as an independent journalist for 8 years. A dual-citizen, she was the founder of Amazwi, a rural non-profit media organization that trained women journalists, and publisher of its award-winning newspaper, The Villager. She would later become the founding national director of Report for America, a national service program that places emerging journalists in newsrooms across the country, addressing critical coverage gaps and the changing landscape of local news.
Messitt is currently the Norman Eberly professor of practice in journalism, director of the News Lab, and affiliate faculty in the School of International Affairs at Penn State University. Her second book Newspaper, part of the Object Lessons series published by Bloomsbury, is forthcoming in May 2024.