As part of our series on ethical travel writing, we recently spoke with Faith Adiele, travel writer, author, and founder of the nation’s first workshop for travel writers of color through VONA (Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation). We discussed misconceptions about the travel writing genre, how we can diversify the publishing industry, and whether or not we should make a distinction between travelers and tourists.

Voices of Our Nations Arts (VONA)—at the time the largest and preeminent multi-genre summer workshop for writers of color—asked me to start a travel writing workshop. My heart thrummed. If any literary genre were in need of desegregation and decolonization, it was travel writing.

As part of our series on responsible travel writing, we recently spoke with Zabrina Lo, an arts and culture reporter for a storied English-language magazine in Hong Kong. We talked about the many ways Chinese and British legacies influence her hometown, her life, and her work.

As part of our series on responsible travel writing, we recently spoke with Tarryn Tomlinson, a TV presenter, travel writer, and accessibility consultant based in Cape Town.

Bolts of lightning flashed across the night sky, the only lights besides those flickering in the distance more than 3,000 meters below at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro, glimmering evidence of refuge I would do just about anything for.

As part of our series on responsible travel writing, we recently spoke with Xu Xi 許素細, Indonesian-Chinese-American, born and raised in Hong Kong. She is the author of fourteen books of fiction and nonfiction and one of Hong Kong’s leading writers in English. She is also editor of five anthologies of Asian writing in English, most recently, The Art and Craft of Asian Stories: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology. She currently occupies the William H.P. Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of the Holy Cross and leads international writing retreats through Authors at Large.

Travelers invaded my childhood. They were always there—well-heeled Westerners who stayed at the Peninsula Hotel; less affluent tourists from other hotels at the tip of the Kowloon peninsula jutting into the Hong Kong harbor; American sailors who poured out of battleships for their R&R, especially during the Vietnam war years; British and other expatriate hires relocating to their well-paid jobs as civil servants, university professors, medical, legal and other professionals, teachers in the foreign schools, diplomats and foreign correspondents.

As part of our series on responsible travel writing, Dr. Anu Taranath explores the politics of writing by contributing a series of TIPS Letters, an exercise that has become a cornerstone of her teaching on culture, diversity, and social justice. You can use the exercise to engage more deeply with Things, Ideas, People, and even yourself.

My hair elicits a global response. Its reception shifts like dialects do, as slight reinterpretations on a theme. In Rodez, France, I wore it as a lion does its mane. The stares were unrelenting, as though we were on safari.

While planning a work trip to Mexico City, a location I already loved, I hatched a plan to bring back the ultimate reward: a patio-full of the legendary Talavera clay pottery the city of Puebla is revered for. I pictured myself buying and shipping huge multicolored hand-thrown pots, pewter accents, maybe a huge ceramic yellow sun to turn my rather drab patio into the tropical paradise I’d always known it could be.

All my life, I’ve belonged to the water. To the space between two countries—Cuba and the United States. That place, which, on some maps, is referred to as Miami, though the place I am referring to is more fluid still.

I stumbled into The Queen Vic in Aberdeen, Scotland after 16 hours of travel. My taxi driver from the airport had said, looking at my AirBnB address, “I think you live close to the local here in Rosemount. It’s one of the best locals in Aberdeen, so you are a lucky lass.”

Natalia Sylvester is the author of three critically acclaimed novels. Her debut, Chasing the Sun was followed by Everyone You Know Goes Home. Her latest, Running, is a young adult novel that came out last year just in time for the election. Sylvester immigrated to the United States from Peru at the age of four and is based in Texas now.

In crossing oceans for our 40-day honeymoon trip through Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, my wife and I had put ourselves back in the closet for a constellation of reasons. Public displays of affection were frowned upon in these countries, so we were careful not to kiss or cuddle in restaurants the way we would’ve back home in Boston.

To access world literature beyond what was translated and censored in the Islamic Republic, I had to improve my English and enter the world of banned books which were smuggled in alongside alcohol, Western film, and music. Limited and expensive, but accessible through the right contacts. Reading books from across the world was a turning point in my life.

Four years ago, I moved to Brazil from my home in Chicago. And when people asked me what my calling as a Black American journalist in Brazil was, I said: To save Afro-Brazilians. I wanted to help Black Brazilians confront racism, rise out of poverty, and achieve their full potential in life. Two years passed before the first person challenged my aspirations.

Whether it’s called the farmers’ market, the wet market, or the central market, it’s one of the first destinations on my itinerary, no matter where I land in the world. The reasons can be practical—simply buying some fresh fruit to eat—but they can also extend far beyond that as a means of entry into a culture.

Carmen Suen, a Hong Kong writer who moved to the U.S. with her Black-American husband, examines Asian attitudes toward racism and what we can all learn by reading.

It was exhilarating to do something just for me, so far off-script for the obedient daughter and people pleaser I had always been. New job, new country, new boyfriend—I managed to make it all happen in a whirlwind three months, so fast that I had no time to sort through the wreckage of my previous life.