Graduate of Rutgers University and holds a Masters in Arts from Cornell University. His stories have appeared in Story, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Best American Short Stories 1996 and African Verse. He won the Pushcart Prize XXII (1997), the Eugene McDermott Award (1998) and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has worked as Associate Professor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has written Ysrael, Drown (a collection of ten short stories in English) and is writing his first novel, The Cheater’s Guide To Love. The New Yorker named him as one of the forty best writers under forty. He lives in New York.