Omer Aziz is an author of Brown Boy: A Memoir. Born to working-class parents of Pakistani origin in Toronto, Canada, with the help of scholarships he became the first in his family to go to college in the West, later studying in Paris, at Cambridge, and Yale Law School. He worked for the U.N. Special Envoy for Syria and as a foreign policy advisor in the administration of the Canadian Prime Minister. He has written for the New York Times, The Atlantic, New York magazine, The Washington Post, The New Republic, and many other publications. Aziz was most recently a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University.