I’m honored and excited to be DETOUR’s first columnist. As a Black girl growing up in a Nordic immigrant family in rural Washington State, I dreamed of traveling the world. I couldn’t wait to escape my conservative village. I took my first solo trip at age 16 — to northern Thailand, where I was one of the only Black people — and never looked back. The world (unlike my hometown) felt like home. Out here, being multiracial/multicultural/multinational wasn’t weird; it was my superpower. When I traveled, I suddenly became visible.

Since then, I’ve worked to desegregate and decolonize the travel space — starting the nation’s first writing workshop for travelers of color and pushing to broaden the definition of travel, writing one of the first memoirs about a Black woman living in Southeast Asia, producing Africana content for platforms like HBO, PBS and the Calm app. I believe that good travel writing has the potential to change our understanding of the world, and since Black folks are the original travelers, we need to be shaping the narrative.

The visionary team at DETOUR shares my love for local and global travel tales and for the myriad reasons and ways we travel. My column, Small World, Big Love, will explore the monthly theme through my particular (and often sarcastic) lens — as a travel memoirist and essayist, a lover of food and disliker of nature, a teacher and scholar, an introvert who keeps accidentally running into people I know around the world. I’ll introduce you to friends who are travel innovators, report on important travel-related arts and culture, and drag my hapless husband along for the ride. Join me!

Faith Adiele

Oakland, California