Category Updates

Friends, it is time you considered doing a residency. Beautiful people around the world open their estates to artists like you, so that you can create in peace. All provide lodging and many serve nightly, home-cooked, communal meals. Some pay their artists weekly stipends of $100 or more; others charge $15 to $50 a day (although scholarships are generally available). Still others are completely free (albeit highly competitive). Some writers (myself included) write whole books by hopping from one artist colony to the next. This is known as being a "colony whore," and is something worth aspiring for.

Not long ago, Laura Contreras-Rowe was invited to give a motivational speech to a pack of female high school basketball players in East Los Angeles. At one point, she asked the young women to name their Latina role model. To her astonishment, the room grew quiet. After recovering, she decided to use their silence as a muse. She spent much of 2009 traipsing around the United States, interviewing 33 Latinas pushing the boundaries of possibility, and just published their stories in Aim High: Extraordinary Stories of Hispanic & Latina Women.

Once a month, I'll be posting upcoming deadlines for what writers consider lifelines: grants, fellowships, and residencies, as well as submission calls and the occasional contest. Here are some dreamy ones for February ...

La gente at the Latin American travel blog Travel Ojos just posted a little interview I did about my favorite country, Mexico ...

Nearly three years ago, I published a guidebook called 100 Places Every Woman Should Go. Ever since, I've kept my eyes peeled for new places to add to the mix, and just discovered another one over the holidays: Land of a Thousand Hills Coffeehouse in Roswell and Atlanta, Georgia. Every coffee bean on the premises hails from two farming cooperatives in Rwanda: the Buf Café Cooperative and the Coadeka-Bukonya Cooperative. Buf Café, I was delighted to discover, is owned by Epiphany Mukashyaka, a widow who became Rwanda's first female entrepreneur after the genocide that killed nearly one million ethnic Tutsi and moderate Hutu sympathizers over a 100-day period in 1994. Started in 2006, Epiphany's cooperative now provides work for more than 2,000 farmers. A good portion of her coffee beans are shipped to Georgia, where they are roasted, blended, and brewed daily by the good folks of Land of a Thousand Hills.

Exciting news: Visual artist Cindy Kane will be showing her wonderful "Helmet Project" at the Sherry Leedy Gallery in Kansas City starting tomorrow night. Here is a description of the show:

The Helmet Project evolved as a natural progression of Cindy Kane's respect for journalists and the desire to create a visual tribute to their work. Kane envisioned a memorial monument created by an installation circle of 50 used steel military helmets, suspended, floating in space, each a stand-in portrait for a specific journalist ...

Hola everyone! I decided to use the publication of my new anthology, The Best Women's Travel Writing 2010: True Stories from Around the World (due out in February by Travelers' Tales) as a springboard for a new blog. I'm envisioning this as a place to share updates from the road as well as insights from contributors and compatriots. Comments are warmly welcome. Thanks so much for stopping by, and Happy 2010!