Molly Beer is a terrible traveler. She reads books about Africa while camping in Tibet, prepares food she learned to make in Italy in her Mexican kitchen, or writes obsessively about El Salvador while living on a rooftop in Ecuador. Worse still, she can’t pack, she suffers from motion sickness, she is terrified of volcanoes, and she once (three days into the Aldo Leopold Wilderness) tore up the map. If she couldn’t write her way to the sense of things, she would probably just stay home.
Molly Beer’s travel writing has appeared in Salon, Guernica, and Best Women’s Travel Writing, among other publications, and has been deemed “Notable” by Best American Travel Writing (2006). She has an MA from the Bread Loaf School, an MFA from the University of New Mexico, and in 2011 she held an Olive B. O’Connor fellowship in creative writing at Colgate University. She is the co-author of the oral history Singing Out (Oxford University Press, 2010).
