Travelers’ Tales award-winning series, Best Women’s Travel Writing, has been showcasing the world’s finest female travel narratives since 2004. The 2010 volume, edited by Stephanie Elizondo Griest, features essays from 27 women in the most far-flung of places, from an icy Ecuadoran volcano-top to a cozy Persian kitchen. You can meet our lovely contributors right here.

Erika Connor

First up is author, activist, singer-songwriter, and viajera loca Marisa Handler.

Mary Caperton Morton is a mountain-scaling, photo-snapping, science-and-travel-writing vagabond who once lived in an off-the-grid solar “Earthship” in rural New Mexico.

American by birth and global by inclination, Liz Sinclair is a freelancetravel writer who volunteers as a grant writer for a maternal health foundation for poor families in Indonesia.

A. Kendra Greene has vaccinated wild boars in Chilean zoos, confirmed that a certain Turkish wonder of the world is now just a single pillar in a swamp of turtles, and occasionally felt like a rock star while teaching English in Korea.

Beebe Bahrami is a writer and anthropologist who has intimately explored the cultures, languages, peoples, and histories of the western Mediterranean world.

Marcy Gordon is a Northern Californian who loves to eat, drink, and travel — especially in Italy.

After receiving a master’s degree in English, Landon Spencer ran away from academia and joined the circus.

Stifling her sobs and dabbing her eyes, Diane Caldwell boarded a plane to Greece in 2003 and hasn’t returned home to the United States since.

Johanna Gohmann has had a rather scintillating career, writing about books and bodies for publications ranging from Bust and Elle to Best Sex Writing 2010.

Christine Buckley’s travels have taken her to five continents and taught her to shear sheep, cultivate rice, sail without a G.P.S. and edit a state-run newspaper with a straight face.

Alison Stein Wellner has circumnavigated the globe in her search for food so spicy, she’d ignite on contact (as she once watched her grandfather do).

Having lived in such glam locales as Paris, St. Moritz, New York, and Los Angeles, Colette O’Connor has crafted a living writing about food, wine, art, home design, and, of course, travel.

Jen Percy grew up listening to Garth Brooks and eating T-bone steaks in Oregon, but has since turned her attention to writing about war and aphorisms from Iowa.

Heather Poole spends her days pushing 300-pound carts at 30,000 feet and then blogging all about it.

Elisabeth Eaves has written a memoir about stripping and a memoir about wanderlust.

Sara Bathum has lived with nuns in Ethiopia, skied down volcanoes in New Zealand, gotten her heart broken in Taipei, and nearly been abandoned at the border in Honduras.

A short-story writer, poet, and essayist, Jennifer De Leon has published in Ms, Poets & Writers, Kweli, and Guernica, and has won fellowships from Bread Loaf and the Macondo Writers’ Workshop.

Deborah Milstein lives within six synagogues and is writing a memoir about Jewish identity.

Born in Pakistan, fluent in French, and married to an Italian, Maliha Masood considers herself a cultural chameleon.

Diane LeBow has trekked across the Mongolian steppe, dived with Red Sea sharks, and explored Parisian cafes.

When not riding the rails through Burma, getting lost in Laos, hitchhiking to Honduras, or bribing her way into Bali, Laurie Weed is spinning exotic tales and clever copy from Northern California.

Erika Connor has taken care of wild birds and raccoons in rehabilitation centers, traveled by white horse in West Africa and Mongolia, and lived with the Fulani and Bambara people of the Sahel.

Intrigued? You can learn more about Best Women’s Travel Writing 2010 here. If you have a story you’d like to submit for the next anthology, visit Travelers’ Tales. Happy travels!