ABOUT

Kimberly Meyer is the author of The Book of Wanderings (Little, Brown), which won the American Society of Journalists and Author’s 2016 Memoir Book Award and was a finalist for the 2015 PEN Southwest Book Award.  In this complex quest for meaning written in spare and lyrical prose, Kimberly sets off with her oldest daughter, Ellie, to whom she had given birth as a single mother her senior year in college.  With Ellie starting college, together they retrace a medieval pilgrimage route from Venice through the Mediterranean to Greece and Cyprus, through the Holy Land of Israel and Palestine, and across the Sinai Desert to Cairo and Alexandria in Egypt.  Their encounters with these places of mystery and conflict, and with the people living in them help deepen the bond between mother and daughter at this crucial juncture in their lives—with Ellie leaving home and Kimberly facing the void of her departure and both seeking a new homeland for themselves.

In her more recent longform journalism on refugees, appearing in Orion Magazine and Texas Monthly, Kimberly writes about those displaced from their actual homelands in the Middle East and Africa and resettled in the United States.  Her current project, funded by the Houston Arts Alliance, documents the journeys of nine single mother refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Congo, and Eritrea as they make their way through Amaanah Refugee Services Transformed Program and attempt to reshape themselves and rebuild their lives.

Past essays and journalism appear in The Best American Travel Writing 2012, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Ecotone, The Oxford American, The Georgia Review, Agni, The Southern Review, Brain,Child, Crab Orchard Review, Natural Bridge, and Third Coast, and her audio-documentary work has been featured on Public Radio International’s This American Life.  Her writing has been supported by residency fellowships to the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference and the Vermont Studio Center, has been awarded a Houston Arts Alliance Established Artist Grant, an Inprint/Michener Fellowship, and a Brown Foundation Fellowship, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Kimberly received her Ph.D. in creative nonfiction from the University of Houston.  She lives and writes in Houston, Texas—the most racially and ethnically diverse city in the country