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
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
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.