Dear Editor,
I am submitting America’s Youngest Ambassador, a 70,000 word work of narrative nonfiction, that documents the story of Samantha Smith, one of the Cold War era’s most intriguing individuals who has largely been forgotten.
In 1982, amidst the nuclear paranoia that engulfed the US and the Soviet Union, Samantha Smith, a fifth grader in Manchester, Maine, wrote a letter to the Kremlin asking the Soviet leader if he was going to start a war. When Pravda, the biggest Soviet newspaper, published her letter—and Samantha received an unprecedented invitation to visit the Soviet Union—her family embarked on a historic journey that helped transform the hearts and minds of two nations on a collision course.
I was seven years old and growing up in the Soviet Union when I watched Samantha’s extraordinary journey unfold in the newspapers and on our black and white TV. Years later, while living in the US, I discovered that no one remembered Samantha’s story. I’ve set out to correct the injustice and in 2005 established www.SamanthaSmith.info (about 60,000 unique visits annually). Over the years I’ve met and worked closely with Samantha’s mother, and fielded inquiries from outlets such as BBC World Service, BBC Russia, Smithsonian, Portland Press Herald, the Kennebec Journal, and NewsCenterMaine.com. In 2013 I interviewed President Gorbachev for the 30th anniversary of Samantha’s trip to the Soviet Union. I’m fluent in Russian and have worked in both US and Russian archives. In 2017 the manuscript was nominated for the Allegra Johnson Prize in Memoir Writing.
Today, the Cold War seems like a possibility once again. The story of a young American girl’s letter to the Soviet leader and her innocent curiosity about the other side of the Iron Curtain holds an important lesson for every American: to never stop questioning the status quo, and to recognize that the responsibility for the preservation of peace is not only the purveyance of the government. Anyone who read The Boys in the Boat and appreciated its insights into a forgotten era would enjoy this work of narrative nonfiction, and it has an important message for young people who strive to be more involved in facilitating change, both locally and worldwide.
As per submission guidelines, I’ve attached a book proposal. A partial manuscript is available upon request.
Sincerely,
Lena Nelson