political issues or the lives of people who encountered problems during the Cultural Revolution, one example being that of the story of the archaeologist Chen Mengjia and his wife, poet and translator Zhao Luorui. In 2013, he published Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West (2013), which, consistent with his previous works, also covers China's ordinary people and life. Hessler left China in 2007 and settled in Ridgway, Colorado, where he continued to publish articles in The New Yorker on topics including the Peace Corps in Nepal and small towns in Colorado. In October 2011, Hessler and his family moved to Cairo, where he covered the Middle East for The New Yorker. In an interview upon being named a MacArthur Fellow in September 2011, Hessler expressed his intention to spend much of the next year learning Arabic. He stated that he envisioned spending five or six years in the Middle East. While living there, he and his wife both learned Egyptian Arabic. In 2019 he published The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution, a book detailing his experiences of Egypt during the Arab Spring. In August 2019, Hessler and his family moved to Chengdu in southwest China. Hessler taught non-fiction writing at Sichuan University - Pittsburgh Institute. During his time in Chengdu, Hessler wrote several pieces for The New Yorker about how China handled the COVID-19 pandemic. Because Sichuan University-Pittsburgh Institute declined to renew his teaching contract, he and his family moved back to Colorado at the end of the first semester of 2021. Personal life Hessler is married to journalist and writer Leslie T. Chang. They are the parents of twin daughters born in 2010. Bibliography References External links Official website Peter Hessler's articles at The New Yorker Living people Writers from Columbia, Missouri Peace Corps volunteers Hickman High School alumni Alumni of the University of Oxford The New Yorker people Princeton University alumni 1969 births MacArthur Fellows People from Ridgway, Colorado