Lesego Malepe left apartheid South Africa with a Fulbright scholarship to study in the US in 1978. After completing her graduate work in political science at Boston University, she taught political science at a college near Boston for many years. She is the author of the novel Matters of Life and Death, published in 2005, about the family of a high school student who was sentenced to life on Robben Island in 1963. She has also contributed op-ed articles to national newspapers, including USA Today, the Baltimore Sun, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the St. Louis Post Dispatch. Malepe has served for many years as a judge for the Children’s Africana Book Awards of the Outreach Council of the African Studies Association, and leads workshops for teachers about how to teach about Africa in general and how to use African literature in the classroom.
