Fred Hunter served as The Christian Science Monitor's Africa correspondent and as a USIS foreign service officer in Belgium and the Congo. A playwright / screenwriter, Hunter's The Hemingway Play was given a staged reading at the Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference, presented at Harvard University's Loeb Drama Center and produced by PBS's Hollywood Television Theater series. Other plays have been performed at the Dallas Theatre Center, ACT in San Francisco and the Ensemble Theater in Santa Barbara. Movies Hunter has written have been produced by PBS, ABC and CBS. Research for his PBS drama Lincoln and the War Within led him to write the historical novel Abe and Molly: The Lincoln Courtship. He's taught Screenwriting at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, at UCSB and at Principia College where he also taught Modern African Literature. The Girl Ran Away is his third novel. A collection of short stories Africa, Africa! drew on his experiences in Belgium and the Congo and as a working journalist, based in Nairobi.