Where I'm From Author Event - Detroit

Join author, award-winning filmmaker, and avid traveler Ebony Walden for a conversation celebrating the release of her debut memoir, Where I'm From: A Poetic Journey Across Five Continents. In conversation with Detroit native Aminata B. Sow, Walden will explore how solo travel across 15 countries and five continents reshaped her understanding of identity, belonging, Blackness, and home.

The evening will include a conversation, audience Q&A, and book signing.

A soulful travel memoir blending poetry, global adventure, and personal transformation — a story about seeing the world, and letting it change you.

About the Book

With the interiority of Wild and the global expanse of Eat Pray Love, this soulful travel memoir blends poetry, global adventure, cultural connection, and personal transformation with reflections on race, identity, and belonging.

In 2010, Ebony Walden—a twenty-nine-year-old city planner, poet, and New York transplant—embarked on an eight-month solo journey across fifteen countries and five continents. Propelled by a desire to find adventure and purpose, she travels from teaching English in Guatemala to conducting poetry workshops in Kenya and paragliding over the Swiss Alps.

Along the way, Ebony writes and shares “Where I’m From” poems with new friends around the world, using poetry as a bridge to explore identity, culture, and belonging.

But every destination challenges her in unexpected ways, forcing her to confront long-buried traumas from growing up in poverty in New York. Through travel, volunteering, and cultural exchange, she begins to understand that travel is not just about seeing the world—but about letting it change you.

About the author:

Ebony Walden

Ebony Walden is an author, filmmaker, and speaker whose life's work sits at the intersection of storytelling, travel, and racial equity. Having traveled to fifty countries and all fifty U.S. states, she brings a rare breadth of lived experience to every page, every frame, and every stage she graces.

She is the founder of Ebony Walden Consulting, a racial equity–focused consulting firm that helps organizations build more just and inclusive cultures. She is also the creator of the award-winning documentary series Black Beyond Borders, an exploration of culture, creativity, connection, and cuisine across the African diaspora — telling the stories of Black communities that the mainstream has long overlooked.

Ebony also writes Beyond Borders, a Substack newsletter on travel and transformation, where she shares essays and reflections offering soulful writing about identity, traveling the the journey of becoming.

She lives in Richmond, Virginia — when she is not traveling the globe, she love to spend extended periods in Senegal.