“Don’t women with children travel?” Marybeth Bond and Pamela Michael enquire, in their book A Mother’s World: Journeys of the Heart (1998), when discovering the absence of portrayals of travelling mothers. Addressing this absence, our book Travellin’ Mama: Mothers, Mothering and Travel explores the multiple dimensions of motherhood and travel. Through a variety of compelling creative pieces and critical essays with a global outlook and wide-ranging historical, cultural, and national perspectives, Travellin’ Mama: Mothers, Mothering and Travel examines the vital contributions made to travel writing and representations of travel by mothers. Autoethnographical approaches inform many of the pieces in this book, illustrating the significance of the personal and writing the self in re-imagining our cultural narratives and representations of travel, and the mothers who undertake it. This book is about mothers who travel, for mothers who travel with their children, and all those readers who have travelled in any capacity, with or without family.

Charlotte Beyer is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at the University of Gloucestershire, UK. She has published widely on crime fiction and contemporary literature. She is the editor of Teaching Crime Fiction (Palgrave, 2018), and Co-Editor of Mothers Without Their Children (Demeter Press, 2019) Janet MacLennan, born on an island in the Atlantic, has made her way to an island of quite different climes–from Canada to the Caribbean to make her home as a professor of communication, narrative researcher, and Travellin’ Mama to a travellin’ boy. Dorsía Smith Silva is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras in the Faculty of General Studies. She is the co-editor of Caribbean without Borders: Caribbean Literature, Language, and Culture (2008), among others. In addition, her poetry has appeared in Adanna, POUI, and Nourish. Marjorie Tesser is the author of two poetry chapbooks THE IMPORTANT THING IS (Firewheel Award Winner) and The Magic Feather. Her poems and short fiction have appeared in Drunken Boat, Akashic Press’ Thursdaze, Earth’s Daughter, The Saturday Evening Post, and others. She is the editor in chief of Mom Egg Review.

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Janet MacLennan is a Professor of Communication Studies in the Department of English (Humanities) of the University of Puerto Rico Río Piedras, San Juan. In her teaching and publishing she uses a narrative perspective to understand human communication, work that has drawn her into the field of medical humanities.

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Dorsía Smith Silva is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. She is the co-editor of Caribbean without Borders: Caribbean Literature, Language, and Culture (2008), Critical Perspectives on Caribbean Literature and Culture (2010), and Critical and Feminist Perspectives on Caribbean Mothering (2013), and editor of Latina/Chicana Mothering (2011). She is the co-editor of Mothers, Mothering, and Globalization (2017) and Travellin’ Mama (2017).

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