Passports to Elsewhere

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Feb 26

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What greater joy is there than a book that really transports you to another place? I still remember being stuck in a broken down coach on the side of a dreary English motorway on a rainy Sunday afternoon twenty-five years ago and not caring a bit, because in my imagination I was on a beach in Greece, thanks to John Fowles and his bewitching novel, The Magus.

There's something especially fascinating about books that take us places we don't already know. It's one thing to write about London or Paris or Rome (or a Greek island, for that matter) - quite another to describe somewhere wholly outside the reader's realm of experience.

We're very excited to be presenting a fascinating panel at Unbound which features three wonderful first-time authors who have each made the brave decision to set their books in places that most readers won't be familiar with: Haiti, Rwanda, and Burma, respectively. What challenges does such an undertaking present? What are the opportunities, and the rewards? Come and hear these writers discuss these and other topics, and read from their beautiful books. You'll be transported.

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Allison Coffelt lives and writes in Columbia, Missouri. Her work has appeared in and won awards from the Los Angeles Review of Books, Hippocampus, Oxford Public Health Magazine, the Crab Orchard Review, and elsewhere. Maps Are Lines We Draw: A Road Trip Through Haiti is her first book. She currently works as the director of education and outreach for the annual True/False Film Fest and hosts the True/False podcast.

Jennifer Haupt went to Rwanda as a journalist in 2006, a decade after the genocide that wiped out over a million people, to explore the connections between forgiveness and grief. She spent a month interviewing genocide survivors and humanitarian aid workers, and came home with something unexpected: the bones of a novel. Haupt’s work has been published in O, The Oprah Magazine, Psychology Today, The Sun and many other publications. Her debut novel, In the Shadow of 10,000 Hills, will be published in April 2018. www.jenniferhaupt.com.

Rosalie Metro is an anthropologist of education who has been researching Burma/Myanmar since 2000. She holds a PhD from Cornell University, and she is currently an assistant teaching professor in the College of Education at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Have Fun in Burma is her first novel. www.rosaliemetro.com.

Passports to Elsewhere

A Message From Matt Wilson!

Fretbards!