Lara Santoro is most recently the author of The Boy, a novel, scheduled to be published by Little, Brown Fall/Winter of 2012.  Her first novel, Mercy, was a finalist for the Foreword Independent Press Award and was optioned by Cowboy Films.   She spent most of her career as a foreign news correspondent, based primarily in Rome and in Nairobi working for Newsweek and The Christian Science Monitor. Her work has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, The Boston Globe, The London Telegraph, The Times of London and The Sunday Times. She holds a bachelor's degree in Comparative  Literature from Smith College, a Master's degree in French Literature from the Sorbonne, and a Master's in Fine Arts from New York University, where she was the recipient of the Developmental  Fellowship, a biannual award. She was born in Rome, and currently lives in New Mexico.