About the Author

Alma Gottlieb is professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of The Restless Anthropologist, The Afterlife Is Where We Come From, and Under the Kapok Tree, all published by the University of Chicago Press. Philip Graham is professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and also teaches at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is the author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction, including The Moon, Come to Earth, also published by the University of Chicago Press. Together they are the authors of Parallel Worlds: An Anthropologist and a Writer Encounter Africa.

Reviews

"At this moment in the history of our divided and violent world, we profoundly need to hear the voices of Alma Gottlieb and Philip Graham as they return to the Beng people of the Cote d'Ivoire and write not just about this remarkable people but about the ways that all of us are inextricably 'braided' together by our love, through our humanity, of sharing the great mystery of existence. Braided Worlds is not only an enthralling book but an important one. And linked with Gottlieb and Graham's earlier Parallel Worlds, the two books form a masterpiece of travel memoir." (Robert Olen Butler, author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain)"