A powerful, intimate memoir of marriage and friendship that traces one woman's experience joining a tightknit community of fellow army wives after leaving her New York City job to follow her enlisted husband. When her new husband joins an elite Army unit, Simone Gorrindo is uprooted from New York City and dropped into Columbus, Georgia--a town so foreign she might as well have landed on the moon. With her husband frequently deployed, Simone is left to find her place in this new world, alone--until she meets the wives. Gorrindo gives us an intimate look into the inner lives of a remarkable group of women and a tender, unflinching portrait of a marriage. A love story, an unforgettable coming-of-age tale, and a bracing tour of the intractable divisions that plague our country today, The Wives offers a rare and powerful gift: a hopeful stitch in the fabric of a torn America.

Vela is an online magazine that publishes nonfiction inspired by travel, written by women. This stellar collection features select work from the magazine, covering terrain as far-flung as Afghanistan, El Salvador, the Philippines, and the former Soviet Union, as well as a college campus, a city bus, and a prison. In keeping with Vela's belief that there are no "women's subjects" and that women should be free to write with the same intellectual and creative freedom as men, these stories explore subjects including war, motherhood, AIDS, human rights, natural disaster, grief, gangs, addiction, home, and illness.

Since 2011, Vela Magazine has published creative nonfiction inspired by travel, written by women. In this first print collection, go dirtbagging in the Yukon, attend a Khmer wedding, ride horses in Navajo Nation, keep up with the boys across Europe, examine the relics of past travels, and fall in love during Oaxaca's revolution.