Cynthia Miller Coffel
Cynthia Miller Coffel is the author of the essay "Letters to David," which won The Missouri Review Editors' Prize in 2007. She is also the author of the academic book Thinking Themselves Free: Research on the Literacy of Teen Mothers. Her essays have been listed as notable in Best American Essay anthologies and have appeared in The Missouri Review, Creative Nonfiction, The Sun, Reader, The ALAN Review, and elsewhere. Her PhD is in literacy education.
Artist Statement
“Stranger in a Strange Land” is a short "line" essay that was published in the “Husbands” issue of the online publication called Dorothy Parker’s Ashes in 2024. It is a description of my first year of teaching in 1979 at the Young Mothers’ Program, a program for married, pregnant, and mothering teens in Ogden, Utah.
A year ago, one of my oldest friends brought me four manila envelopes filled with letters I'd written her throughout my twenties, thirties, and forties--what a gift! In rereading the letters from my twenties, and in thinking about the kind of world JD Vance seems to want for women, I played around in new ways with what is really old material, these stories of learning how to teach disenfranchised young women in an unusual environment. A "line" essay, like this one, tells its story in matter-of-fact ways, line after line: it's a way of structuring a story I'd never used before this. Even though I've written a whole book, my PhD dissertation, Thinking Themselves Free: Research on the Literacy of Teen Mothers, based around that year with those young women, there always seems to be more to say.
