Ebony Walden joins the Author Spotlight this week to chat about her travel memoir, Where I’m From

Author Name: Ebony Walden

Book Title: Where I’m From: A Poetic Journey Across Five Continents

Book Genre: Travel memoir

Release Date: September 8, 2026

Welcome, Ebony! Please tell us a bit about your book.

Where I’m From: A Poetic Journey Across Five Continents is a soulful travel memoir about my eight-month journey  across fifteen countries and five continents, volunteering, backpacking, and writing poems with new friends. It’s about the places I visited, the people I met, and the poems I created with them, but ultimately it’s about how those experiences forced me to reflect on my own story and changed my perspective on life, love, relationships, and finding home within.

What drew you to write a memoir about this experience? What made you want to tell this particular story?

I knew the trip had changed me, but I didn’t fully understand how. Initially, I wrote a memoir for myself. It was a way to return to the journey and capture the ways I had been transformed and the lessons I had learned day by day, encounter by encounter, country by country. I decided to pursue publishing years after the journey, because by that time travel became central to my brand again, and I had traveled to so many more places. I wanted to share not only the experience from the book, but use that as a jumping off point for sharing my broader travel stories, and lessons accumulated from two decades of travel. 

I think it’s a compelling story about travel and becoming. I have not read many books by Black women travelers, and especially not those traveling across five continents, volunteering and writing poetry across cultures. 

What do you hope readers will gain or learn from reading about your experience?

I hope the book inspires people to be curious about the world, but also curious about themselves. Travel for me is not about finding the perfect place, but learning how to be present, connect deeply with people, and find peace within yourself. My lens for the trip was to explore the beauty and brokenness of the world, but along the way I learned to reflect on and radically accept the beauty and brokenness within myself. I hope readers finish the book thinking about their own stories, the experiences that have shaped them, and what they might be ready to embrace, release, or explore next. I also hope they will take the fifteen lessons I share and live like a traveler by dreaming big, being open and fully embracing community and connection. This is the core of living an interesting life regardless of whether you have fifty stamps on your passport. 

From your perspective, what’s the hardest thing about writing and researching? And what do you love most about it?

The hardest part for me is figuring out what the story actually is. I usually have plenty of material. For this book, I had journals, daily blogs, 7,000 photographs, videos, poems, memories, and stories from seventeen countries. But everything couldn’t go into the memoir. The work was deciding what mattered and what moved the larger story of transformation forward.

I love immersing people in my experiences and then offering reflections, making meaning and gleaning universal wisdom that is helpful to others. My writing usually begins with an experience, a question, or something I am curious about, and then I follow it through observation, conversation, research, and reflection. I love taking dynamic experiences and finding the deeper wisdom underneath them.

What’s capturing your imagination these days outside of reading and writing?

Filmmaking. I self-produce a documentary series called Black Beyond Borders that explores the beauty, culture, creativity, and cuisine of Black life across the African diaspora. It’s just another form of storytelling, so that is fun to move from the page to the screen. It’s really just a visual memoir. I think of myself as a storyteller across mediums, and I’m interested in how the same question can become an essay, a film, a podcast, a community conversation, a workshop, or something else.

Any new writing projects in the works?

Right now, I’m writing essays on my Substack, Beyond Borders, and continuing to explore travel, transformation, and what it means to live beyond borders. I’ve traveled to over 200 cities, 50 countries, and all 50 U.S. states. Over the next five years, I want to get more of those travel stories into the world through various publications.

I also want to publish a few poetry collections. One, Soul of a Woman, Soul of the World, is a collection of poems I wrote immediately before, during, and after my around-the-world trip. Another, In Retrospect, revisits travel and identity sixteen years later, exploring how we understand the same experiences differently with time.

I also have two future book ideas: Bold Moves, centered around eight bold moves I’ve made in my life, why I made them, how I navigated them, and what I learned; and a Black Beyond Borders essay anthology featuring Black women writing about travel, becoming, and what it means to move through the world as a Black woman. I have plenty to write. The question is what comes first.

Where can readers find you?

You can find everything on my website,www.ebonywalden.com.

Thank you, Ebony! Where I’m From is out TODAY.

Where I’m From: A Poetic Journey Across Five Continents

Perfect for fans of Eat, Pray, Love, this soulful travel memoir blends poetry, global adventure, cultural connection and personal transformation with reflections on race, identity, and belonging.

In 2010, twenty-nine-year-old poet Ebony Walden quits her job to go to on an eight-month solo journey across fifteen countries and five continents. Propelled by a sense of purpose and adventure, she moves from teaching English and volunteering in places like Guatemala and India to conducting poetry workshops in Kenya, walking the ruins of Machu Picchu, and paragliding over the Swiss Alps.

Along the way, Ebony writes “Where I’m From” poems with the people she meets—intimate reflections that capture family, identity and culture, weaving their voices into her own unfolding journey. But each destination also challenges her in unexpected ways, forcing her to reckon with the hardships of growing up in New York in the ’80s and ’90s. Through breathtaking landscapes, unexpected setbacks, and profound encounters with strangers, Ebony begins to understand that travel is not just about seeing the world—it is about allowing the world to change you.

Part travel memoir, part coming-of-age story, Where I’m From invites readers to take their own journey beyond borders and come home to themselves.

Author Bio:

Ebony Walden is an author, filmmaker, and speaker who has traveled to nearly fifty countries and all fifty US states. She is the founder of Ebony Walden Consulting, a racial equity–focused consulting firm, and the creator of Black Beyond Borders, a documentary series and podcast exploring culture, creativity, connection, and cuisine across the African diaspora. Ebony also writes Beyond Borders, a weekly Substack newsletter on travel and transformation. She lives in Richmond, Virginia.