Allison Coffelt
Allison Coffelt is a writer, teacher, and editor working at the intersection of health and humanities. She is the author of the award-winning nonfiction book, Maps Are Lines We Draw: A Road Trip through Haiti. She holds a Master's in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Missouri, co-facilitates a course in narrative medicine at the University of Utah, and is earning her MS in narrative medicine at Columbia University. Her work has been featured in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and on KBIA-FM. Allison lives between the Wasatch and the Oquirrhs in Salt Lake City, Utah.
After a decade of dreaming, Allison Coffelt arrived in Haiti, ready—she thought—”to learn how much she didn’t know” about the Caribbean nation. Traveling the highways with Dr. Jean Gardy Marius, founder of the public health organization OSAPO, she embarked on a life-changing journey that would weave Haiti’s proud, tumultuous history and present reality into her life forever.
Maps Are Lines We Draw explores the culture and natural beauty of the island as well as its discomfiting realities: the threat well-intentioned aid organizations can present to the local economy; the privilege that determines who gets to travel between a “here” and a distant “there” which is foreign and other; and the challenge of doing short-term good without creating long-lasting harm.
Winner of the 2019 Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Gold Award in Travel Book