Peter Hessler is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of six books. Originally from Columbia, Missouri, he joined the Peace Corps, which sent him to Fuling, a small city on the Yangtze River. From 1996 to 1998, he taught English and American literature at Fuling Teachers College, an experience that eventually became  the subject of his first book, River Town (2001). This book was followed by two others about China, together they comprise Hessler’s “China Trilogy”. In 2011, Hessler moved with his family to Cairo, where he covered the events of the Egyptian Arab Spring. His book about this period in Egypt, The Buried (2019), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2019, Hessler returned to China, where he researched his most recent book, Other Rivers (2024). Hessler was named a MacArthur Fellow. He is married to the writer Leslie T. Chang, and they currently live with their twin daughters in southwestern Colorado.