Clair MacDougall is an independent journalist who is based in West Africa. Her work has focused on Liberia’s post-war construction and imperfect attempts to reconcile with its brutal past. Clair reported on the Ebola outbreak and its aftermath, contributing to The New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage and earning her the Kurt Schork Memorial Fund Award. She has written about mercenaries, former warlords and child soldiers, drug addiction, justice for war crimes and government corruption and reported from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Kenya, Mali, rural Australia, the United States, and India
At MacDowell, she further developed and wrote chapters for her book West Point Calypso, which follows a group of ex-fighters and marginalized youths who were driven by war and poverty into a vast seaside slum in the heart of the Liberian capital of Monrovia. Focusing on them as a symbol of the inequalities at the heart of Liberia’s difficult history, Clair is weaving the stories of West Point residents’ daily struggles with reflections on the international community’s attempts to aid the country in the aftermath of civil war and the Ebola outbreak.
