Alden Jones is the author of the memoir The Blind Masseuse: A Traveler's Memoir from Costa Rica to Cambodia, and a story collection, Unaccompanied Minors. The Blind Masseuse won the Independent Publishers Book Award in Travel Essays and a ForeWord Book of the Year Award, was longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, and was named a top ten travel book by the Huffington Post, Publishers Weekly, and A Traveler's Library. Unaccompanied Minors is the winner of the 2013 New American Fiction Prize. Alden has lived, worked, and traveled in over forty countries, including as a WorldTeach volunteer in Costa Rica, a program director in Cuba, and a professor on Semester at Sea. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Time Out New York, Post Road, the Barcelona Review, the Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, WBUR's Cognoscenti, and the Best American Travel Writing. She holds degrees in literature and creative writing from Brown University, New York University, and the Bennington Writing Seminars, and now lives in Boston, where she teaches at Emerson College.