Mohomodou Houssouba grew up in Gao, northeastern Mali. He studied languages and literature, trained as an English teacher at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Bamako, and later attended creative writing workshops for his English MA at Illinois State University where he also earned a PhD in English studies with a focus on the teaching of African-American and Diaspora studies. Since 2005, Mohomodou has been leading the Songhay language localization and content production project. The result is a platform (www.songhay.org), which gathers a wide array of online resources for the speakers and learners of the different varieties of the Songhay language. As writer and researcher, he engages the modernization of Songhay through its active use in writing, translation, art, and digital creativity. Mohomodou is the secretary of the Songhay Cross-Border Language Commission of the African Academy of Languages of the African Union.