"LETTER TO A STRANGER" Author panel

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Join us and author Colleen Kinder to discuss her LETTER TO A STRANGER, accompanied by 7 authors who contributed essays to the collection; Rachel Swearingen, Howard Axelrod, Sheba Karim, Amber Meadow Adams, Keija Parssinen, Sally Franson, and Aviya Kushner.

About the Book:

When journalist, essayist, and world-traveler Colleen Kinder founded Off Assignment, an intimate, renowned online travel magazine, she began with a prompt that challenged her peers to “write a letter to a stranger who haunts you.” The outpouring of responses showcased a new kind of travel writing centered on raw, personal stories that celebrate the digressions inherent in every journey. Now, Algonquin is proud to present Kinder’s LETTER TO A STRANGER: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us, a collection of these poignant missives to the nameless, authored by a diverse cast and set all over the globe. Featuring contributions from some of the most influential and innovative writers of our time, including never-before-seen essays from Faith Adiele, Gregory Pardlo, Maggie Shipstead, Elizabeth Kolbert, Pico Iyer, Peter Orner, Vanessa Hua, and more, the 65 essays in this collection carry readers from a train in Berlin to a rickshaw in Mandalay, from a Grand Canyon hiking trail to the Rwandan border, and remind us how a stranger’s loaded glance, shared smile, or even just a question posed can change everything. 

Bestselling author Leslie Jamison reveals she has been haunted for years by a traveling magician she met in Nicaragua. Meera Subramanian confesses she has never been able to shake the man who told her about dancing cobras in the south of India. Monet Patrice Thomas recalls the way a pharmacist sold her emergency contraception like a handful of rice in Beijing, so she did not feel ashamed. Jacquelyn Mitchard recalls a stunningly dressed woman in white on the subway in New York City. “We spend so much of our lives in the company of people whose names we’ll never know, people we’ll never meet again,” writes Jamison, in the book’s foreword. “How rarely we honor them. How rarely we admit to ourselves the strange, unannounced ways they can lodge inside of us.” Immensely tender and inspiring, LETTER TO A STRANGER is a celebration of the seemingly detached bystander just one blink away from forever impacting our lives.

About the Author:

Colleen Kinder is an essayist and editor whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, National Geographic Traveler, Salon.com, and The Best American Travel Writing. She has taught writing at Yale University, the Chautauqua Institution, and Semester at Sea. A Fulbright Scholar, Kinder received her MFA at the University of Iowa and is the author of Delaying the Real World and the cofounder of the online magazine Off Assignment.

About the Contributors who will be on this panel:

Rachel Swearingen is the author of the prize-winning story collection, How to Walk on Water. Her work has appeared in VICE, The Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of several awards, including a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. She lives in Chicago and teaches at the School of the Art Institute.

Howard Axelrod is the author of The Stars in Our Pockets and The Point of Vanishing, the latter of which was named one of the best books of 2015 by Slate and the Chicago Tribune. His essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review online, O Magazine, Politico, Salon, and VQR. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program at Loyola University in Chicago.

Sheba Karim is the author of four novels: Skunk Girl, That Thing We Call a Heart, Mariam Sharma Hits the Road, and The Marvelous Mirza Girls. She is the editor of the anthology Alchemy: The Tranquebar Book of Erotic Short Stories 2. She is a Writer-in-Residence at Vanderbilt University and received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Amber Meadow Adams is Lower Mohawk of the Six Nations at Grand River. She holds a Ph.D. in Indigenous Studies from the University at Buffalo and a B.A. in Literature and Writing from Columbia University. Her short fiction and scholarship have been published in the UK, US, and Canada. She is currently reworking her doctoral research on the Haudenosaunee story of Creation into a novel.

Keija Parssinen is the author of The Ruins of Us, which won a Michener-Copernicus Award, and The Unraveling of Mercy Louis. A graduate of Princeton University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Tulsa. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Salon, Slice, The Brooklyn Quarterly, New Delta Review, This Land, Five Chapters, Marie Claire, and elsewhere.

Sally Franson is the author of the novel A Lady’s Guide to Selling Out. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, San Francisco Chronicle, and Best American Travel Writing, among other places. She lives in Minneapolis.

Aviya Kushner grew up in a Hebrew-speaking home in New York. She is the author of The Grammar of God, a National Jewish Book Award Finalist, Sami Rohr Prize Finalist, and one of Publishers Weekly’s Top 10 Religion Stories of the Year; Eve and All the Wrong Men; and Wolf Lamb Bomb.