Born in Chicago, Annia Ciezadlo grew up in Bloomington, Indiana.nbsp;She received her Master's in journalism from New York University in 2000. In late 2003, she left New York for Baghdad, where she worked as a stringer forThe Christian Science Monitorand other publications for the next year. During this time, she wrote groundbreaking stories, about parliamentary quotas for women, Baghdad's graffiti wars, militant Islamist poetry slams, the flight of the country's Christian minority, and Iraq's first reality tv show. Her first-person piece on what it's like to go through checkpoints in Baghdad earned a flood of responses, and is now used by the US military to help prevent civilian… casualities. Since then, she has reported on revolutions in Lebanon, crackdowns in Syria, repression in Iraqi Kurdistan, and the 2006 "summer war" between Israel and Hezbollah. Although she has covered several wars, Annia does not describe herself as a war correspondent. She specializes in articles about Arab culture and civil society, stories that explore the intersections between larger political realities and everyday activities like driving, cooking, and going to school.She has written about culture, politics, and the Middle East forThe New Republic, The Nation, The Washington Post,nbsp;theNational Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Observer,and Lebanon's Daily Star newspaper. She is currently a special correspondent forThe New Republic,based in Beirut. Annia lives somewhere between New York and Beirut, with her husband, the journalist Mohamad Bazzi.