Breakfast with Polygamists: Dispatches from the Margins of The Americas

The word “travel” comes from the French word travail and the Latin word tripalium, which was a three-pronged instrument of torture in Roman times. But in Dave Seminara’s world, even the worst trips are worth remembering. Eating breakfast with cave dwelling polygamists in Utah. Following in the footsteps of Pablo Escobar, the Hatfields & McCoys, Kurt Cobain, and Justin Bieber. Visiting with swamis, witches and medicine men in Belize, Nicaragua, Chile and the Navajo Nation. Even getting deported from Argentina is better than staying home. These are just some of the adventures chronicled in Breakfast with Polygamists: Dispatches from the Margins of The Americas, a new collection of 29 stories from fourteen countries across The Americas, including The Bahamas, the Dominican Republic, Uruguay, Brazil, Suriname, Nicaragua, Chile, Canada, Ecuador, Colombia, Trinidad, Argentina, Belize, and The United States. Traveling as a backpacker, a diplomat, and later as a roving journalist, Seminara’s curiosity has taken him from the icy streets of Justin Bieber’s hometown in Canada to the mean streets of Medellin’s Barrio Pablo Escobar, inside Navajo hogans, hillbilly art galleries, and Nicaraguan witches’ lairs, astride the world’s biggest trees and in search of missing persons. In Breakfast with Polygamists, readers experience what it’s like to become a human ATM in an impoverished Mayan village in Belize, get conned by the Amish, and share muffins and conspiracy theories with polygamists inside a cave home carved out of a 400 foot tall rock.Dave Seminara is a journalist, former diplomat and self-diagnosed pathological traveler who lives in St. Petersburg, Florida. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, BBC, The Washington Post, Outside, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Magazine, ESPN, The Boston Globe and dozens of other publications. His first book, Bed, Breakfast & Drunken Threats: Dispatches from the Margins of Europe was a #1 bestseller in Malta and Liechtenstein. In 2016, Dave won a Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism award and his stories have been featured as notable stories of the year in the 2014 edition of The Best American Sports Writing and the 2015 and 2019 editions of The Best American Travel Writing.