Alden Jones

Dr. Alden Jones is an author, editor, executive producer, and 2024–2027 Fulbright Specialist whose work moves across fiction, memoir, literary criticism, travel writing, documentary, and experimental forms.

A three-time Lambda Literary Award nominee, Dr. Jones is the author of the critical memoir The Wanting Was a Wilderness; the New American Fiction Prize-winning story collection Unaccompanied Minors; and the travel memoir The Blind Masseuse, longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. She is the editor of Edge of the World, a collection of travel essays by LGBTQ+ writers, and executive producer of the documentary film Utterly Shameless: Edmund White and the Making of a Gay World. Her short works have appeared in the Boston Globe, New York Magazine, BOMB, Agni, Prairie Schooner, the Iowa Review, and Best American Travel Writing.

A central query of Dr. Jones’s creative practice is the relationship between lived experience, authorial intention, and the slippery notion of truth. Her research and teaching interests include memoir and autofiction, literary fiction, LGBTQ+ and feminist literature, photography, exoticism, and the ethics of cross-cultural representation. A proponent of paper texts and close reading, her pedagogical practices have been cited by Teen Vogue, The Christian Science Monitor, The Faculty Lounge: Tips for Teaching Professors podcast, and the Associated Press. Emerson awarded her the Alan L. Stanzler Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2016.