Gitura Mwaura is a Nairobi

Nairobi

Nairobi is the capital and largest city of Kenya. The city and its surrounding area also forms the Nairobi County. The name "Nairobi" comes from the Maasai phrase Enkare Nyirobi, which translates to "the place of cool waters". However, it is popularly known as the "Green City in the Sun" and is...

-based writer currently working as a media consultant with various organisations. He is a published author and development journalist previously involved in the areas of gender and HIV/Aids as a researcher and human rights activist working with various local and international Non-Governmental Organisations.

His collection of short stories, Portraits of the Heart, was published in 2001. He has just co-authored the book, The Resilience of a Nation: A History of the Military in Rwanda.

Gitura is formally the chairperson of the Kenya Coalition for Access to Essential Medicines (KCAEM), which played an important role in successfully lobbying the Kenyan Government, Parliament and international pharmaceutical companies to enable easy access to essential for the treatment of malaria and TB, and, most notably, HIV anti-retroviral drugs.

Gitura has worked in both electronic and print media, and occasionally contributes to the local media, both in Rwanda

Rwanda

Rwanda or , officially the Republic of Rwanda , is a country in central and eastern Africa with a population of approximately 11.4 million . Rwanda is located a few degrees south of the Equator, and is bordered by Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo...

 and Kenya

Kenya

Kenya , officially known as the Republic of Kenya, is a country in East Africa that lies on the equator, with the Indian Ocean to its south-east...

.

Portraits of the Heart

Gitura’s signature book, Portraits of the Heart, is a collection of eleven short stories that deal with such themes as separation, illness and death in the family setup. Other issues tackled in the book are AIDS

AIDS

Acquired immune deficiency syndrome or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome is a disease of the human immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus...

, infertility

Infertility

Infertility primarily refers to the biological inability of a person to contribute to conception. Infertility may also refer to the state of a woman who is unable to carry a pregnancy to full term...

 and parent-children relationships.

Articles

One of the more prominent writer in the East Africa

East Africa

East Africa or Eastern Africa is the easterly region of the African continent, variably defined by geography or geopolitics. In the UN scheme of geographic regions, 19 territories constitute Eastern Africa:...

n region, numerous Gitura Mwaura articles have been published by various newspapers and newsletters. These publications include The Standard

The Standard

The Standard is an English free newspaper of Hong Kong with a daily circulation of 231,018. It was called the Hong Kong Standard and changed to HKiMail during the Internet boom, but it changed back to The Standard in 2001....

 , The New Times, The Daily Nation, The EastAfrican

The EastAfrican

The EastAfrican is a weekly newspaper published in Kenya by the Nation Media Group, which also publishes Kenya's national Daily Nation. The EastAfrican is circulated in Kenya and the other countries of East Africa including Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda...

, Blogger News Network, etc.