Growing up in a two-stoplight Midwestern town, I had no idea how vast and interesting the world was. In college, I did my best to make up for lost time, trekking to Norway to track down my great-grandparents' village, studying abroad in Niger (where I apprenticed with a Tuareg silversmith and bought myself a pet donkey), trading my Spanish class for Zulu when I learned it would lead to a free summer in South Africa, building houses in Nicaragua, and so forth I have an MFA in Nonfiction Writing and have published essays in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Best Women's Travel Writing 2008, World Hum, A Woman's World Again: True Stories of World Travel, Abroad View and Transitions Abroad, among others. I work as a writer for an educational travel company.