Recounting the experiences of an around-the-world trip, author and poet Ebony Walden’s new memoir, Where I’m From: A Poetic Journey Across Five Continents, engages deeply with her childhood in New York, as well as aspects of her time in Charlottesville.
Before moving to Charlottesville for graduate studies in urban planning, Walden grew up in Queens and Long Island. “My home was filled with love and support … but still marred by poverty—water being cut off, winters without heat,” she writes. “Scarcity had shaped me. I knew how to survive, but … survival isn’t the same as freedom.” In Where I’m From, Walden grapples with these experiences, making meaning from her past as well as the journey that ultimately took her to 17 countries over the course of eight months in 2010 to 2011.
“I was not trying to write about my past at all,” says Walden. “But those were the things that came up as I was writing. In memoir, your goal is to find the story under the story. The larger story is I went around the world. But … the most interesting part is what you learn about me.”
Engaging support from her faith community, family, and friends, she crowdfunded the trip, pitching it as the Poetic Justice World Tour. Her plan was to backpack and volunteer her way around the world, engaging with the people she met through a “Where I’m From” fill-in-the-blank poem template along the way.
“The lens for me going on the trip was trying to find the beauty and the brokenness in the world, and then to find the beauty in the brokenness,” reflects Walden. “I’ve got to be strong to get through this very dynamic but trying situation, but I also have to learn to be soft and vulnerable. I have to both plan but then let go of my plans. I have to learn how to be present because that is all the trip is asking of me.”
Her creative work reflects this dynamic as well. “When I read my poems from before that trip, they’re very didactic,” Walden says. “And I think that’s what I tried to communicate: strong, confident, self-assured person. … And then I read the poems I wrote on the trip and after the trip, and I’m writing from a vulnerable place.”
Throughout Where I’m From, Walden engages through the dual lens of race and gender, navigating tensions between her experiences in the U.S. and abroad, living and traveling as a Black American woman, as well as in connection with other people she meets. “I think the trip was a precursor to [realizing that] I can engage with people about diversity, equity, and inclusion, and about culture, because I’ve literally crossed 50 cultures myself and had to navigate with privilege,” she says. “Of course, in the U.S., I’m a quote-unquote minority. I’m not part of the dominant group racially or as a woman. But I go around the world and I have passport privilege, educational privilege, and financial privilege.”
Traveling in Central and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia, Walden faced challenges ranging from broken luggage and altitude sickness to bronchitis and dental issues, but she also connected with people about their deepest sorrows and their most meaningful joys. She tried local cuisine, went paragliding, almost got arrested, and performed at open mic nights.
“I was trying to have a dynamic experience that I could capture and try to figure out what it wanted to become after I did that,” Walden recalls. And writing a memoir wasn’t originally part of that plan. Though she shared her journey through a community exhibit at CitySpace, it wasn’t until 2014 that Walden took her first memoir writing class through WriterHouse as a way to more fully capture her trip experiences. She then took a two-year memoir intensive with writer Sharon Harrigan, during which she workshopped what would become Where I’m From.
Even then, Walden says, “I didn’t enter any of those classes thinking that I was going to publish a memoir. … The trip was ego-shattering for me. But it was also an extraordinary journey.”
She shelved an initial draft of the full book around the end of 2017 in order to focus on launching her business, Ebony Walden Consulting, a racial equity-focused consulting firm, and creator of “Black Beyond Borders,” a documentary series exploring the African diaspora. Though she now lives in Richmond, Walden is a former City of Charlottesville neighborhood planner and founder of Charlottesville’s WordSmith Poetry Jam.
In 2024, while working on a proposal for another project, Walden returned to her draft—and it felt like her story was ready to share.
Walden writes, “[This book] has become much more than a recounting of my adventures—it is an homage to the transformative power of travel, a call to dream out loud and embark on the journey of self-discovery that lies within each of us.”
