Tiffany Hawk is a travel writer who earned that role the hard fun way – as a flight attendant. She spent five years filling her passport while fighting fires at 37,000 feet, literally.

She’s still traveling and has written several hundred stories for publications that include The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Coast magazine, Sunset, GQ.com, globorati.com, and The Huffington Post. Her short fiction and personal essays have appeared in such places as The Potomac Review, StoryQuarterly, and NPR’s “All Things Considered,” and her debut novel, Love Me Anyway, will be published in 2013 by Thomas Dunne, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

Tiffany and her pilot husband (the cliché is not lost on her) live wherever the Air Force sends them. Today, that’s New Jersey, and when she’s not on the road, you can find her teaching at Rutgers University.