I’ve been a teacher for over 30 years and a traveler for longer. As a child, I lived in Germany and Japan. When I grew up, I continued to travel, teaching and living in Thailand, London, and China. I’ve written book chapters, poetry, travel pieces, and won a number of writing prizes: the 2023 New York Book Festival prize and a finalist for both the Peter Taylor Prize for Literature and the Gival Press Novel Award. A graduate of Middlebury College (BA) and University of Rochester (PhD), I now live in San Diego with my husband and two cats, teach adult literacy, and work as a volunteer at the San Diego Zoo.
I wrote
The Same Bright Moon: Teaching China's New Generation During Covid
This book presents China in 1996. Hessler, a Peace Corps volunteer, settles into teaching in the picturesque, remote city of Fuling. There, he describes the struggles of making meaningful connections as an outsider.
At the end of the book, he muses that he didn’t build anything or make great changes. Instead, he tried to learn as much as he could about his students, the city and its people. But of course, that is what talented teachers do. They build relationships rather than monuments. They create goodwill rather than make empty political speeches.
A sad coda: in 2020, the U.S. Senate stopped funding the Peace Corps in China. Unrelated, Hessler’s contract with Sichuan University was discontinued due to a political misunderstanding. Both are stark examples of how political relationships, despite the work of teachers, are fragile.
When Peter Hessler went to China in the late 1990s, he expected to spend a couple of peaceful years teaching English in the town of Fuling on the Yangtze River. But what he experienced - the natural beauty, cultural tension, and complex process of understanding that takes place when one is thrust into a radically different society - surpassed anything he could have imagined. Hessler observes firsthand how major events such as the death of Deng Xiaoping, the return of Hong Kong to the mainland, and the controversial consturction of the Three Gorges Dam have affected even the people of…
Whereas Hessler’s book is about a country gradually opening up to the west, Suki Kim’s book is about a country completely isolated.
Kim works for six months in North Korea at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, a school for the boys of the ruling elite. While living there, rather than connecting with her students, she is unsettled by how deep the country’s deceptions are.
The university, although claiming to be a school for science and industry, has neither labs nor modern technology. Her travel is circumscribed and carefully scripted. The students lie effortlessly about things of little consequence. The entire country seems to be built on holograms and shadows. She travels as teacher, but in the end serves as journalist, seeking the truth behind a country that the world barely understands.
It is 2011, and all universities in North Korea have been shut down for an entire year, except for the all-male Pyongyang University of Science and Technology. This is where Suki Kim has accepted a job teaching English. Over the next six months she will eat three meals a day with her young charges and struggle to teach them to write, all under the watchful eye of the regime.
Life at the university is lonely and claustrophobic. Her letters are read by censors and she must hide her notes and photographs not only from her minders but also from her…
This memoir by an Iranian-American professor describes teaching for decades in Iran: first, as instructor at the University of Tehran; later, as facilitator for an all-female book group.
At the university, she advocates for meaningful acts of civil disobedience. Through the book group, she introduces a small group of women, shut out of the country’s educational system, to Western literature. In both, we see her turn an oppressive environment into a space where her students become human, sentient, and creative.
The tenderness with which she treats both her students and the novels that they’re reading makes this memoir a lovely example of how teaching can transcend political ideology.
When Azar Nafisi was fired from Tehran University (where she was teaching English literature) because she refused to wear a veil, she gathered a group of her female students and resumed her classes at home, privately and discreetly. There, a group of young women discussed, argued about and communed with Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Henry James, Nabokov and others in the canon of English writers. The surreal picture of reading "Lolita", weighing the sexuality of Jane Austen or the American authenticity of Gatsby in the severe aftermath of Iran's Islamic Revolution was not lost on either Nafisi or her students. The…
Perhaps the most famous teacher abroad is Anna Leonowens, who was immortalized in the musical The King and I. A lowly Victorian woman single-handedly reshapes the history of Thailand. If you want to read that story you can read Margaret Landon’s Anna and the King of Siam.
Far more interesting is Anna’s true story: a con artist, who lies about everything that happened to her. Habegger’s biography Masked sorts through the lies and fiction. He offers a complicated narrative of a biracial woman who told exaggerated tales of enslavement, romance, and her imagined role in democratizing Thailand. Her life becomes one of fancy and self-invention. Both sadly are traps too often seen in myths crafted by self-absorbed travelers living abroad.
A brave British widow goes to Siam and-by dint of her principled and indomitable character-inspires that despotic nation to abolish slavery and absolute rule: this appealing legend first took shape after the Civil War when Anna Leonowens came to America from Bangkok and succeeded in becoming a celebrity author and lecturer. Three decades after her death, in the 1940s and 1950s, the story would be transformed into a powerful Western myth by Margaret Landon's best-selling book Anna and the King of Siam and Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical The King and I.
This book reverses the pattern set so far. Rather than a Western teacher traveling to foreign lands, in this memoir, an Irishman travels to teach in New York City.
There, he becomes the teacher you always wanted: compassionate, funny, lyrical, a raconteur. He describes the range of his experiences, from vocational institute to highly competitive high school. In one assignment, he challenges his students to write a creative excuse for being absent. In another he asks the students to turn family recipes into poetry.
His book reminds us, through wit and sharp observation, why teachers, abroad or at home, are diplomats, magicians, myth-makers, and superheroes. In the end, he shows us how talented teachers take us on journeys and help us understand our place in the world.
Nearly a decade ago Frank McCourt became an unlikely star when, at the age of sixty-six, he burst onto the literary scene with Angela's Ashes, the Pulitzer Prize -- winning memoir of his childhood in Limerick, Ireland. Then came 'Tis, his glorious account of his early years in New York.
Now, here at last, is McCourt's long-awaited book about how his thirty-year teaching career shaped his second act as a writer. Teacher Man is also an urgent tribute to teachers everywhere. In bold and spirited prose featuring his irreverent wit and heartbreaking honesty, McCourt records the trials, triumphs and surprises…
In 2019, a burned-out teacher quits her job to teach 200 students in the ancient, walled city of Xi’an, China. The year turns extraordinary when tensions between China and the U.S. escalate. First tit-for-tat tariffs; then a worldwide pandemic; finally lockdowns, closed consulates, and expelled journalists. All the while, accusations are lobbed back and forth like flaming arrows launched over the Pacific.
The Same Bright Moon is the story: China’s newest generation told during a remarkable year to the teacher who is assigned to teach them. Their vibrant voices will challenge, inspire, and bring hope for the future.
On the run from her abusive husband, Kyra Smith hits the road. Destination unknown. With a dog she rescued in tow, she lands in the peaceful California mountain town of Gold Creek and is immediately befriended by an openhearted group of women who call themselves the Tattooed Ladies. They’re there for Kyra—and for each other.
The maternal Frannie is a tattoo artist struggling with a troubled daughter. Suzy is a self-described fashionista grandma bearing a painful estrangement from her son. Then there’s Jo, whose storybook marriage is shadowed by a grim medical diagnosis. And bookstore owner Marisol. She longs for…
A woman escaping a violent past finds new friendships, romance, and tenuous sanctuary in an emotionally gripping novel by New York Times bestselling author Eileen Goudge.
On the run from her abusive husband, Kyra Smith hits the road. Destination unknown. With a neglected dog she rescued in tow, she lands in the peaceful California town of Gold Creek and is immediately befriended by an openhearted group of women called the Tattooed Ladies Club. They're there for Kyra-and for each other.
The maternal Frannie is a tattoo artist struggling with a troubled daughter. Suzy is a self-described fashionista grandma bearing a…
