Masha is the author of four acclaimed novels, most recently 31 Hours (2009), an Indie Choice pick by independent booksellers, which Publisher's Weekly called "gorgeous and complex."  Masha is also the founder of two world literacy programs: the Camel Book Drive, begun in 2007 to supply a camel-borne library in northeastern Kenya, and the Afghan Women's Writing Project, begun in 2009 to foster creative and intellectual exchange between Afghan women writers and American women authors and teachers.

Masha worked as a foreign correspondent for The Associated Press for five years in the Middle East, where she covered the intefadeh, the peace process and the partial Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon.   She then spent five years in Moscow, where she was a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, wrote a newspaper column,  "Postcard from Moscow", and reported for NBC/Mutual Radio.   She wrote about Kremlin politics as well as life for average Russians under Gorbachev and Yeltsin during the coup and collapse of the Soviet Union.   She reported from Afghanistan in 2004, and returned in 2008.   In 2006, she traveled in Kenya to research The Camel Bookmobile and to interview street kids in Nairobi and drought and famine victims in the isolated northeast.

A Brown University graduate, Masha has been awarded fiction fellowships from Yaddo,  Blue Mountain Center,  Squaw Valley Community of Writers and the Arizona Commission on the Arts.  She teaches for Gotham Writers' Workshop and has also taught at the 92nd Street Y in New York City and at a number of writers' workshops around the country.   She is a licensed shiatsu practitioner and lives with her family in Brooklyn.
 

http://www.mashahamilton.com/