Rhonda Wiley-Jones

Rhonda Wiley-Jones is an award-winning travel writer. She published her coming-of-age travel memoir, At Home in the World: Travel Stories of Growing Up and Growing Away. Her debut novel, Song of Herself, is an adventure story of a young horsewoman who dares to travel to India alone, after losing her brother in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. She’s to sell her uncle's quarter horses to the British/Indian Military to breed with the Manipuri horse used for polo to enhance their agility. Both books illustrate her belief that travel can be transformative and build psychological agency, especially for women.

Wiley-Jones grew up cotton-field straight, rice-field swollen with evangelical zeal, and sunbaked in reality in rural Northeast Arkansas. As a teen, she traveled to Europe for the Baptist Youth World Conference, served as summer missionary in Hawaii and college-based missionary at Westminster College in Utah, experiencing two cultures within the United States. At twenty-seven, she backpacked solo to the United Kingdom. Since then, she has traveled to Japan, Australia, South Africa, Costa Rica, France, Ireland, Turkey, Peru, and every year to Mexico.