Deni Béchard was born in British Columbia to Québécois and American parents and grew up in both Canada and the United States. He has also traveled in over fifty countries. His recently-published memoir, Cures for Hunger, describes growing up with his father who was a bank robber, and was both an IndieNext pick and Amazon Canada’s editor’s pick as one of the best memoir/biography of 2012. Empty Hands, Open Arms, a book about conservation in the Congo rainforest, was published in October 2013. His first novel, Vandal Love, was published in French and Arabic, and won the 2007 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, both for the best first book in Canada and for the best overall first book in the British Commonwealth. It was also nominated for Le Prix du Grand Public Salon du Livre Montréal / La Presse, 2008, as well as the French version of Canada Reads (Le Combat des Livres, 2009), and in 2012 was on Oprah’s Book Club’s summer reading list. He has been a fellow at MacDowell, Jentel, Ledig House, the Anderson Center, Vermont Studio Center, and the Edward Albee Foundation. He has done freelance reporting from Northern Iraq as well as from Afghanistan, and has written for a number of magazines and newspapers, among them the LA Times, Outside, Salon, VQR, the National Post, Maisonneuve, Le Devoir, the Harvard Review, and the Harvard Divinity Bulletin. He is introduced by Rachid Aadnani, Lecturer in Middle Eastern Studies at Wellesley College.