Fuller’s debut novel, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood, was a New York Times Notable Book. Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier, her second work, won the Ulysses Prize for Art Reportage. Her latest work is the story of the brief life and tragic early death of a third-generation oil rig worker in Wyoming titled The Legend of Colton H. Bryant. She has also written extensively for magazines and newspapers including The New Yorker and National Geographic.
Fuller’s books are, at the heart of it, anti-war novels. When she was three, her family moved back to Rhodesia during their intensifying bloody struggle for independence. They farmed close enough to Mozambique to hear landmines going off. She was educated in Zimbabwe until she was 18. While she doesn’t write overtly political novels, her experiences of life’s swiftness have given her words a startling humor that is the key behind the success of her work.
The Geisler Library Writers Reading series was established in 1987 to promote an appreciation of the books and their authors and features locally, nationally and internationally known writers reading and discussing their works. Central College received a grant from Humanities Iowa, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, to support Geisler Library Writers Reading spring 2011 series. This is the seventh year that Humanities Iowa has chosen to support this program.