​Her Playing with Osito | Jugando con Baby Bear (Barranca Press) won the 2018 NM/AZ Book Coop Award for best bilingual children's book, and she published a series of children's books -- Juma and Little Sungura, Juma on Safari, Juma Cooks Chapati, and Juma's Dhow Race -- introducing Tanzania and the Swahili language (Barranca Press 2013). Her short fiction appears in Street Level (Mkuki Na Nyota 2011) and Mama Dar (CI Group 2010). While a lecturer in literature and creative writing at the University of Dar es Salaam, she wrote a literary studies textbook (2011) and co-edited a collection of Tanzanian literature in English, Tell Me Friends (2009). 

LM’s mother taught her to sew on her great-grandmother’s treadle machine, and her father, a photographer and linguist, passed on an artist’s eye and obsession with words. As a textile artist, she uses image to ignite meditation, and hand-sewn textiles to illustrate children’s picture books. LM particularly enjoys hand sewing because it leads to contemplation.

​She currently divides her time between New York and Bénin, but grew up in México and the United States, and has lived around the world.

​She holds a doctorate in English from the University of Pennsylvania, is wife to one man, and mother to two sons.

Place

​"A place frames one's identity and one's way of thinking. My place is both my home and my position in society.

My places include México (Rocoroibo in the Sierra Madre, Tlalpan in the DF, Mitla, Ixmiquilpan), the United States (Palo Alto, El Paso, Lenexa, New Fairfield, Waltham, St. Paul, St. Petersburg, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Manassas, Rockville, Taos, New York City), China (Beijing), Benin (Calavi and Ouidah), South Africa (Port Elizabeth and Grahamstown), Gabon (Libreville), Rwanda (Kigali), Tanzania (Dar es Salaam), and Zimbabwe (Harare).

The word derives from older English notions of open spaces and from the Latin tradition of plazas. Place therefore signifies in both the private and the public realms. Liminal space, that threshold, that place where one is neither one nor the other, is my place."