Alex_Sheshunoff

Alex Sheshunoff is a writer-like person whose work has appeared in National Geographic Adventure, Slate.com, Marketplace, The Anchorage Daily News and other very, very prestigious media outlets. Before deciding to call himself a writer, Alex snuck through Yale and started and ran an Internet company in New York called E-The People – a nonpartisan precursor to Moveon.org (but with a pun in its name) that was featured in the New York Times, Forbes, CNN, and elsewhere.

Five years later, burnt out and facing a quarter-life crisis, Alex gathered the 100 books he was most embarrassed not to have read and moved to a small island in the Pacific called Yap. He earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop and later wrote a vaguely-humorous memoir with a very long title about the experience: A Beginner’s Guide to Paradise: 9 Steps to Giving Up Everything So You Too Can: Move to the South Pacific, Wear a Loincloth, Read a Hundred Books, Diaper a Baby Monkey, Build a Bungalow and Maybe, Just Maybe, Fall in Love!* (Individual results may vary.) Miraculously, Penguin Random House released it in hardcover on September 1, 2015.

Because of his unique last name, Alex is often asked if he’s somehow related to Ian Shenanigan Sheshunoff, the first-place winner of the Diaper Derby Crawling Contest at the 2008 Alaska State Fair. They are indeed related. Ian is his son. Today, Alex and his wife, Sarah, live in Ojai, California with Ian and his equally talented younger brother, Andrew Commissioner Sheshunoff.