Alden Jones


Alden Jones is an American writer.

Life

Jones was born in New York City and raised in Montclair, New Jersey. She graduated from Brown University. She spent a year in Costa Rica as a volunteer English teacher for WorldTeach. While she pursued graduate studies in Creative Writing at New York University and Bennington College, Jones traveled abroad frequently as a teacher and trip organizer to countries including Cuba, Costa Rica, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, and France, and wrote regularly for the travel section of Time Out New York. In 2006 she was a Visiting English Professor on Semester at Sea. She is on the faculty of Writing, Literature and Publishing at Emerson College, where she was awarded the 2016 Alan L. Stanzler Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Writing career

Jones's travel essay, "Lard is Good For You," appeared in the inaugural edition of Best American Travel Writing, edited by Bill Bryson. Her short stories and essays have appeared in , Prairie Schooner, Post Road, the Iowa Review, The Rumpus, and other magazines. In 2013 her travel memoir, The Blind Masseuse: A Traveler's Memoir from Costa Rica to Cambodia, was published by the University of Wisconsin Press. The Blind Masseuse explores the ethics of traveling as an American abroad and was named Recommended Reading by PEN American Center and a Top Ten Travel Title of 2013 by Publishers Weekly. Her story collection, Unaccompanied Minors, won the 2013 New American Fiction Prize and was named by the Star-Ledger's Jacqueline Cutler as one of the "Ten Best Books of 2014 by New Jersey Authors."

Awards