Born and raised in Antigua, Marie-Elena John wasn't considering a writing career when she left her Caribbean island for New York's City College. There, thanks to a semester spent at the University of Nigeria, she became fascinated by the intertwined cultural commonality of the Continent, the Caribbean, and the African-American experiences.

After graduating as CCNY's first Black woman valedictorian, she went on to earn a Masters degree from Columbia University, focusing on culture and development in Africa.

From a Washington D.C. base throughout the 1990s, she worked with non-profit organizations, traveling throughout Africa, first in support of grassroots development efforts, later working with pro-democracy and human rights movements, and eventually becoming best known in her field for her pioneering work on the denial of women's inheritance rights in Africa.

Recently, though, she has been channeling her vast knowledge of and passion for the African Diaspora into her dazzling literary debut, Unburnable – a multi-generational novel that powerfully brings together Caribbean history, African customs, and African-American sensibilities, published by HarperCollin's Amistad in April 2006.

Marie-Elena John and her husband Will Smith and children Trey and Elyse currently share their time between Washington D.C. and Antigua.

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Unburnbable

Award-winning literary phenomenon Chimamanda Adichie has singled out Antiguan writer Marie-Elena John's debut novel Unburnable as "wondrously intelligent" and recounts that she laughed out loud often during her read. In London's The Guardian review section, a number of famed authors were asked to name book they'd enjoyed on their travels. Adichie, who has just won one of the most prestigious literary prizes in the UK, the Orange Broadband Prize, for her second novel Half of a Yellow Sun, chose Unburnable as one of her Great Escape reads.

Unburnable has recently been shortlisted for the 2007 Hurston-Wright Legacy Award in the Debut Fiction category. Interestingly, that award was won by Adichie in 2004 for her first book, Purple Hibiscus .

John and Adichie share another connection: John lived in the early 1980s as an exchange student on the same campus (University of Nigeria, Nsukka) where Adichie grew up. At the time, Adichie would have been about five years old, while John celebrated her twenty-first birthday in Nsukka.

John spent subsequently spent over a decade as an Africa development specialist before turning to writing, working with organizations including The African Development Foundation and Global Rights (formerly The International Human Rights Law Group), both based in Washington, D.C.