Rolf Potts

Rolf Potts (born October 13, 1970) is an American travel writer, essayist, and author. He has written two books, Vagabonding (Random House, 2003) and Marco Polo Didn't Go There (Travelers Tales, 2008), and his travel writing has appeared in National Geographic Traveler, Outside, Salon.com, Slate.com, The Guardian, and World Hum. His non-travel essays and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The Believer, the New York Times Magazine, and the digital versions of The Nation and The Atlantic.

Potts directs the summer creative writing workshop at the Paris American Academy, and he was the 2011-2012 ArtsEdge Writer-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania. He currently teaches nonfiction writing at Yale University.

The son of schoolteachers, Potts grew up in Wichita, Kansas and graduated from Wichita North High School in 1989. He began college at Friends University, spending his summers working for an Outward Bound-style wilderness camp in Colorado and hopping freight trains across the Pacific Northwest. He later transferred to George Fox University, where he graduated with a degree in writing and literature in 1993.

After graduation Potts worked as a landscaper in Seattle for a year before embarking on an 8-month Volkswagen Vanagon journey around North America. Potts later moved to Busan, South Korea, where he taught English at technical college for two years. He started writing travel stories for Salon.com in 1998, while still living in Korea.

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