Alden Jones is the author of the forthcoming bibliomemoir "The Wanting Was a Wilderness," which dismantles Cheryl Strayed's "Wild" and uses the subsequent tools to build a memoir of her own 85-day wilderness expedition within the same text. Her travel memoir "The Blind Masseuse" (University of Wisconsin Press) was longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, named a Top Ten Travel Book by Publishers Weekly, and the subject of a 3-page spread in Curve Magazine's 2014 travel issue. Her story collection "Unaccompanied Minors" (New American Press) won the New American Fiction Prize and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and the Publishing Triangle's Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction. Her work has appeared in Best American Travel Writing, The Cut, The Rumpus, Agni, the Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Believer. Formerly a travel educator, she founded the Cuba Writers Program with Tim Weed in 2016, and leads writing-focused trips to Cuba annually. She has been a professor on Semester at Sea and a Cuban Culture Expert for Royal Caribbean Cruises, and presently teaches in the Newport MFA and at Emerson College.