Clemantine Wamariya is author of the memoir "The Girl Who Smiled Beads".

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Clemantine Wamariya was six years old when genocide tore apart her home country of Rwanda. ^[1]

In 1994, she and her fifteen-year-old sister, Claire, fled the Rwandan massacre and spent the next six years migrating through seven African countries, searching for safety.

During this time they lived in fear, perpetually hungry, imprisoned and abused, enduring refugee camps.

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When Wamariya was twelve, she and her sister were granted refugee status in the United States, in Chicago.

Wamariya attended Yale University. ^[undefined]