Annia Ciezadlo is a freelance foreign correspondent who specializes in writing about food and politics in the Middle East and elsewhere. Her book Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War (Free Press, 2011), was hailed by The New York Times as “among the least political, and most intimate and valuable, to have come out of the Iraq war.” It has been translated into four languages and won numerous awards, including the American Book Award; the Dayton Literary Peace Prize (nonfiction runner-up); the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award (second place, nonfiction); the Books for a Better Life Award (for First Book); and the James Beard Foundation Book Award (finalist, Writing and Literature). 

 

Ciezadlo lived in the Middle East for most of the past decade, during which she was a special correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor in Baghdad (2003-2004) and The New Republic in Beirut (2005-2007). During this time, she wrote groundbreaking articles about Baghdad’s graffiti wars, militant Islamist poetry slams, the flight of the country’s Christian minority, parliamentary quotas for women, and Iraq’s first reality TV show. Since then, she has reported on revolutions in Lebanon, crackdowns in Syria, repression in Iraqi Kurdistan, the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, and the region’s ongoing Sunni-Shiite conflict. Ciezadlo specializes in stories about Arab culture and civil society, articles that explore the intersections between the larger political realities of war and everyday activities like driving, cooking, and going to school. This collection includes stories about Hezbollah perfume, Iraqi war poetry, Beirut's communal bread ovens, Baghdad's political graffiti, and more.

 

Ciezadlo’s writing on culture, politics, and the Middle East has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Granta, and The Nation. Before moving to the Middle East, she was a senior editor at the award-winning New York City newsmagazine City Limits. She lives with her husband in New York.