Sarah Menkedick is the founder of Vela. She is a writer, editor, traveler, runner, and creative nonfiction MFA student at The University of Pittsburgh. Before returning to the U.S. for graduate school, she spent six years living, teaching, and traveling abroad. She has embarrassed herself, been robbed, gotten sick, made friends, eaten unidentifiable foods, had existential crises, gotten hopelessly lost, camped, hiked, dreamt, and watched terrible movies on second class buses on five continents, and is still obsessed with the ethics and ironies of travel. Her work has been published on Amazon’s Kindle Singles, World Hum, qarrtsiluni, Matador Network, Perceptive Travel, and Change.org, among other publications. She was a summer 2011 intern at Harper’s Magazine. Currently, she is taking a semester off school in order to travel around Oaxaca’s Sierra Norte with her husband, working on a fellowship project about the connections between migrant communities in the United States and the annual fiestas in Oaxaca’s indigenous mountain villages.

Read Sarah Menkedick's recent stories:

• A Letter to My Thirties
• Under the Gaze of Saint Peter
• The Morning Song
• Proof of Extreme Hardship
• Down and Out in West Texas