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Description of  Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World

At 21, Beln left the U.S. and didn't look back. Alone, far off the beaten path in places like Syria and Tajikistan, she confronts violence, lechery, and places where its hard to find a good glass of wine, and reflects on what it means to be an American in a largely American-made mess of a world. After growing up in Washington, D.C. and Texas, and then attending Columbia University in New York, Beln Fernndez ended up in a state of self-imposed exile from the United States. From trekkingthrough Europe, the Middle East, Morocco, and Latin Americato packing avocados in southern Spain, to marrying a Palestinian-Lebanese man, to witnessing the violent aftermath of the 2009 coup in Honduras, the international travel allowed her by an American passport has, ironically, given her a direct view of the devastating consequences of U.S. machinations worldwide. For some years Fernndez survived thanks to the generosity of strangers who picked her up hitchhiking, fed her, and offered accommodations then she discovered people would pay her for her powerful, unfiltered journalism, enablingas of the present momentcontinued survival. In just a few short years of publishing her observations on world politics and writing from places as varied as Lebanon, Italy, Uzbekistan, Syria, Mexico, Turkey, Honduras, and Iran, Beln Fernndez has earned a place alongside Martha Gellhorn and Susan Sontag as one of the most trenchant observers of American actions abroad.