About
Off Assignment is a non-profit literary magazine with a penchant for journeys and a fascination with strangers. Born out of a desire to tell “the story behind the story," we’ve evolved from a journalists’ after-hour parlor to a home for literary essays about journeys, broadly defined.
OA began when co-founder Colleen Kinder invited legendary journalist Pico Iyer to her Yale writing class. She expected Pico to analyze the essay she’d assigned to her students: a classic portrait of Reykjavik he had authored two decades earlier. But he digressed into a tale he had never put to the page, about a magnetic local with whom he’d wandered Iceland’s unfading summer streets. This stranger dominated Pico’s memories of his reporting trip. Struck by this, Colleen asked fellow writers: Have you ever had a story you wanted to write, behind an assignment? They answered: Always.
Colleen then joined forces with digital media strategist Vince Errico to co-found Off Assignment as a space for the raw, personal stories not found in mainstream publications—tales that honor the digressions inherent to every journey. Our flagship column, “Letter to a Stranger,” launched in 2016. It now spans over 80 countries, features award-winning missives, and is immortalized in a print anthology.
We’ve since expanded to include more columns, weaving interviews and illustrations into our story-telling: “No Equivalent” plumbs the depths of words that resist translation into English; “Under the Influence” explores the interplay between art and place; “Witching Hour” features brief, ambient portraits of places at a specific time of day; and “What I Didn’t Say” taps authors to release the untold stories behind their published work.
Off Assignment aims to put forth a new kind of travel writing: one that not only transports readers across geographical borders, but plunges them deeper into the human experience.
“Too often people work for magazines or newspapers on deadline. If it takes 30 years, let it take 30 years. Stories never die. People die, but some stories don’t.”
— Gay Talese at Off Assignment's March 2014 “Unpitchable” Event
“We spend so much of our lives in the company of people whose names we’ll never know, people we’ll never meet again. How rarely we honor them. How rarely we admit to ourselves the strange, unannounced ways they can lodge inside of us.”
— Leslie Jamison, foreword to Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us
Team
Colleen Kinder, Co-Founder & Executive Director
Colleen has written essays and articles for The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, VQR, The Wall Street Journal, A Public Space, the Atlantic.com, Salon.com, Creative Nonfiction, AFAR, and Best American Travel Writing 2013. She teaches for Yale Summer Session in Auvillar, France.
Vince Errico, Co-Founder
Vince is a global executive with over three decades of digital strategy and management experience. He has held global strategic planning, product development, and marketing roles at major financial services companies including American Express, Visa International, and Charles Schwab. He has extensive experience in advising digital startups. He earned his MBA from Columbia Business School and has a Bachelors degree from the University of California at Berkeley.
Anya Tchoupakov, Managing Editor
Anya is an editor and wordsmith based in Edinburgh, Scotland. She studied Book History at NYU and the University of Edinburgh, and has written about food, dance, family, and other subjects for VICE, Bon Appétit, Dirt, and more.
Aube Rey Lescure, Deputy Editor
Aube is a French-Chinese-American writer. She grew up between Provence, northern China, and Shanghai, and graduated from Yale University in 2015. Aube’s debut novel, River East, River West, is published by William Morrow/HarperCollins. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Guernica, LitHub, Electric Literature, The Millions, WBUR, The Florida Review Online, Litro, and more. Her essay “At the Bend of the Road” was selected for Best American Essays 2022.
Tusshara Nalakumar Srilatha, Associate Editor
Tusshara is a writer and editor based in London. She studied Literature and Creative Writing and Psychology at NYU Abu Dhabi. Through her poems and essays, she explores questions of belonging and memory. She has written about topics such as art, travel, food, and well-being for Beau Monde Traveler, Postscript, The Tempest Co., and more.
Carey Baraka, Guest Editor
Carey is a writer from Kisumu, Kenya. He has written for The Guardian Longreads, Guernica, Serious Eats, and The Atlantic, and received grants and fellowships from Macdowell, the Silvers Foundations Foundation, and IWP. He sings for a secret choir in Nairobi.
Logan Davis, Writing Courses Manager & Assistant Editor
Logan is a nonfiction writer living in Brooklyn. She has worked on the editorial staff at Harper’s, Narratively, and Fifty Grande, and is a candidate for her MFA in literary reportage at New York University. Broadly speaking, she writes about people and places we have something to learn from.
Jane Demarest, Illustrator
Jane is an illustrator based in New York City. They graduated from Pratt Institute in 2020 with a BFA in Communications Design with a focus on Illustration. Some of Jane’s clients include Universal Music Group, Courtney Barnett and Rainbow Kitten Surprise. Jane has been an American Illustration Selected Winner (2020) and shortlisted for the Seymour Chwast MA-g Awards (2021).
Stephen Knezovich, Marketing Strategist
Stephen is a marketing strategist who works with writers, artists, and arts nonprofits. He is the co-founder of the literary magazine Short Reads, the marketing director for Ascender Book Services, a collage artist, and operates two email newsletters: Read This and Gluu. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his wife and two kids.
Board of Directors
Edwin Cohen, Rick Passov, Anne Fadiman, Vince Errico, Kathryn Besemer, Amber Meadow Adams, Louise Langheier, Marcia DeSanctis
Advisory Board
Greg Marshall, Jina Moore, Katy Osborn, Ali Francis, Alexander Lumans, Faith Adiele, Jenessa Abrams, Kat Lewis, Daniel Tam-Claiborne, Meghan Gunn, Erica Berry, Yi-Ling Liu, Lilly Dancyger, Sally Franson, Lauren Cerand, Genie Gratto, Jamie Andersson
Staff Alumni
Sophie Haigney, Katy Osborn, Kristina Ensminger, Julia Calagiovanni, Sam DiSalvo, Nicole Clark, Meron Hadero, Olaniyi Omiwale, Jackson Barnett, Sam Benson Smith, Candace Rose Rardon, Joshua Tranen, Sarah Holder, Jordan Cutler-Tietjen, Dustin Dunaway, Charlotte Emerson, Elaina Plott, Tekendra Parmar, Lenora Todaro, Rachel Veroff, Maggie Milstein, Charlotte Foote, Julianna Björkstén, Claudia Crook, Stephan Sveshnikov
Off Assignment is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.