Natalie is the author of the novel, Queen Sugar, which was adapted for seven television seasons by writer/director Ava DuVernay, and co-produced by Oprah Winfrey. Queen Sugar was named one of the San Francisco Chronicles’ Best Books of 2014, and nominated for an NAACP Image Award. In her new non-fiction book, We Are Each Other’s Harvest: Celebrating African American Farmers, Land & Legacy, Natalie brings together essays, poems, conversations, portraits, and first-person narratives to tell the story of Black people’s connection to the land from Emancipation to the present. We Are Each Other’s Harvest is an Amazon Editor’s Pick and was a Wall Street Journal Book of the Year, 2021. Natalie's non-fiction work has appeared in National Geographic, The Bitter Southerner, O, The Oprah Magazine, and numerous anthologies.
For our fifth episode of S3 of There She Goes, we're proud to partner with VONA Traveling While BIPOC, the nation's first writing workshop for travelers of color. Adriana is a cultural anthropologist and women’s rights advocate. She is the award-winning author of Looking for Esperanza, My Mother’s Funeral, Keeping Quiet: Sixteen Essays on Silence, an essay collection coming out on September 24th, and Good Girls Don’t Sing La Bamba, coming out in 2025. Her essays, mostly on women’s issues, have been published in The Sun, Fourth Genre, The Georgia Review, The Carolina Quarterly, and others. Adriana teaches creative nonfiction in the low-residency MFA program at Fairfield University and has offered Women Write, a writing class for Afghan university-level women looking to further their education. She writes from Colombia, where, oddly enough, she works as a dance and yoga instructor.
Kelly is the co-creator and co-host of There She Goes, a storytelling travel podcast. Beyond her creative endeavors in modern quilting and the banjo, Kelly has more than 20 years of experience managing nonprofits. She recently had her first solo art show and will have a piece on display at LAX for the next year. She enjoys dual citizenship with Italy and loves Sicily—especially a little beach with blue and white umbrellas in Cefalu. This is her first essay.
Lindsey is the author of The View From Below: Stories and The Water Will Hold You, a memoir. Her essays have appeared in Cimarron (SIMMERON) Review, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Best American Spiritual Writing, Real Simple, and Image. Lindsey’s award-winning short fiction has been published in Mississippi Review, Glimmer Train, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. Lindsey lives in San Francisco and is a member of the Writers Grotto.
Meera Subramanian is an award-winning independent journalist, and author of A River Runs Again: India's Natural World in Crisis. Her work has been published in Nature, The New York Times, The NewYorker.com, and many others, and she’s a contributing editor of Orion magazine. She has been a Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT, a Fulbright-Nehru senior research fellow, the board president of the Society of Environmental Journalists and a Visiting Professor at Princeton University. In 2022, she received a National Geographic Explorer grant. Based on a glacial moraine on the edge of the Atlantic, she’s a perpetual wanderer who can't stop planting perennials.
You all may know us as Podcasters, but we’re also moms – and we have deep love for the mothers who raised us – so we’re delighted to be starting off Season Three in honor of Mother’s Day, traveling with Emma Morell to Qatar, where she explores the joys and challenges of motherhood and living abroad. Emma Morell is an award-winning British travel writer, researcher, and blogger. Emma has spent more than a third of her life outside of the UK in 11 cities on 5 continents and has moved more than 30 times. She writes mainly about travel from an expat and a family angle and has been featured in publications in the UK, US, Middle East, and Southeast Asia.
For our final episode of Season 2, we're proud to partner with VONA Traveling While BIPOC, the nation's first writing workshop for travelers of color. In this episode, Christina Brobby journeys to the Faroe Islands, where she pushes through anxiety and finds herself moved to tears by an experience that awaits her. Christina lives in Canada’s Yukon on the Traditional Territories of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation and the Ta'an Kwäch'än First Council. Her non-fiction pieces have won a number of awards including 2022 Writers Union of Canada’s Short Prose Competition. Her photography has appeared in The Sun magazine and Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Non-Fiction. Christina is a graduate of (VONA) Voices of our Nation Foundation.
Today we travel with Sivani Babu to Antarctica, aboard a sailboat crossing the Drake Passage—the roughest sea in the world and a place of deep desolation. A place where there is no rescue. Sivani Babu is the co-founder and co-CEO of Hidden Compass and an award-winning photographer and journalist. Her work meshes history, science, and exploration, and has appeared in numerous national and international publications and exhibits. Her stories have also been anthologized in the Best Women’s Travel Writing and recognized multiple times in the Best American Travel Writing series. A former federal public defender, Sivani teaches storytelling as a tool for advocacy to law students across the country. Sivani's episode (https://www.there-she-goes.co/podcast/27)
This week we travel with our own co-host Lavinia Spalding to Busan, South Korea, where, after being told her whole life she can’t sing, she finally finds her voice. Lavinia is an award-winning author and editor who has published ten books. She’s the author of Writing Away, six-time series editor of The Best Women’s Travel Writing, and co-author of With a Measure of Grace, This Immeasurable Place, and the 2022 Frommer’s EasyGuide to New Orleans. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times’ Modern Love column, AFAR, Tin House, Longreads, Yoga Journal, Sunset, AirBnB magazine, Off Assignment, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian, and many more national and international publications. Her work has won gold Lowell Thomas and SOLAS travel writing awards, has been widely anthologized. For more information (https://www.there-she-goes.co/podcast/26)
Today we travel with Yukari Kane to Hokkaido, Japan, where, after a kidney transplant, she skis, and bathes in hot springs, and attempts to make peace with a version of Japan she didn’t expect to find. Yukari Kane is an author, educator and veteran journalist with 20 years of experience including at The Wall Street Journal and Reuters. She is co-founder and CEO of Prison Journalism Project and the author of "Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs." The day her book launched in March 2014, she was diagnosed with late-stage kidney failure. She had a kidney transplant with her sister as a donor a year later.
Today we travel with Samantha Schoech to Venice, Italy, where she basks in afternoon espressos, pitchers of Prosecco, flirtation with an Italian man named Fluvio, and the pure happiness of being unfettered. Samantha is a writer, traveler, and mom in San Francisco where she works as the books editor at the San Francisco Chronicle. Her essays, fiction, and journalism have appeared in many places including the New York Times, Seventeen, and Travel and Leisure. She was once briefly detained in Panama due to a hotel towel kerfuffle. www.samanthaschoech.com
A quick check in about summer and a glimpse of things to come for the remainder of Season 2.
This week, in honor of Father’s Day, we travel with Alison Singh Gee to Yosemite National park in California, where she revisits memories of her father and finally musters the strength to stand up to an old nemesis. Alison, a former Time Inc. journalist, wrote Where the Peacocks Sing, a Hong Kong-India memoir about her discovery that her Indian-journalist fiancé grew up in a 19th-century palace. She is a professor of creative nonfiction at Scripps College, and her essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Poets & Writers, and Westways. She is working on a new memoir, about LA’s Chinatown.
This week we travel with Sandra Gail Lambert to the Florida Everglades, where she finds out if her complex solo kayaking plan will be worth the effort –or even possible. Sandra Gail Lambert writes fiction and memoir that is often about the body and its relationship to the natural world. She is the author of the Lambda Literary Award-nominated memoir A Certain Loneliness and The River's Memory, a novel. Her writing has been widely anthologized and published by The New York Times, The Sun Magazine, Orion, and The Paris Review. Lambert is an NEA Creative Writing Fellow.
Today we travel with Jenna Scatena to a jungle in Northern Thailand where she impetuously entrusts her life to a mysterious, notorious--and potentially dangerous--trekking guide. Jenna is an independent journalist based in Istanbul and San Francisco. She has been an editor for Sunset and San Francisco Magazines and has reported for American and British media from 21 countries in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe, where her work explores the intersection of place and culture. She’s an international correspondent for Conde Nast Traveler and her stories have appeared in The Atlantic, BBC, San Francisco Chronicle, AFAR, O the Oprah magazine, Marie Claire, and Vogue, among others.
Today we travel with Angela Long to India, where she meets a holy man with an important message for her. Angela Long is a freelance journalist and multi-genre writer. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including the Globe and Mail, Utne Reader, and Poetry Ireland Review. She's the author of two books, Observations from Off the Grid (2010), and Every Day We Disappear (2018). While she calls Canada home, she lives part-time in Galicia, Spain where she cares for a growing number of abandoned cats.
Jacqueline is the author of the novels, Passing Love and Searching for Tina Turner . Her essays have been published in Best Women’s Travel Writing 2011 and 2020, and the Huffington Post. She received her MFA in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts from the University of California Riverside. The Bay Area native lives in Oakland, and continues her travels to nurture her passion for photography and exotic foods.
Today we travel with Pam Mandel to Branson, Missouri, where she finds a state of confusion and an unexpected plot twist in the familiar Passover story. Pam’s work has appeared in Seattle Met, Lonely Planet, the San Francisco Chronicle, DK Eyewitness, Afar, AAA’s Via Magazine, G Adventures, and the Best Women’s Travel Writing. She co-founded The Statesider, an award-winning publication that curates the most interesting stories about US travel and culture. She's at work on a screenplay based on her gritty coming of age travel memoir, The Same River Twice, A Memoir of Dirtbag Backpackers, Bomb Shelters, and Bad Travel. Nerd’sEyeView.com (Nerd’sEyeView.com)
Today we travel with Lisa Boice to Ecuador, where she searches for inspiration in the form of one courageous, elusive bird. When not working her corporate job as a communications manager, Lisa Boice travels the world with her husband in search of birds. Her work has appeared in The Statesider and she has received a handful of Solas Travel Writing Awards from Travelers Tales. Stories of her birding travels can be found at TheAccidentalBirder.com and she is currently working on a memoir.