February 23, 2011 Khaled Mattawa was thirteen when Muammar Gaddafi’s forces began hanging “traitors” in Mattawa’s home city of Benghazi. The next year Mattawa left his native Libya, accompanied only by his eighteen-year-old brother, to move to the U.S., where opportunities were plentiful and dictators were conspicuously absent. Mattawa’s parents and four younger sisters stayed behind. Because of Gaddafi’s suspicion of ex-pats, Mattawa could not return. He didn’t see the rest of his family again for twenty-one years.

February 22, 2011 For several years novelist Richard Bausch and science writer Rebecca Skloot were colleagues at the University of Memphis (though Skloot recently left the program to move to Chicago); now they’ve each been nominated for the 2010 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in their respective categories: Bausch is on the short list for fiction; Skloot’s nomination is in Science and Technology writing.