[2] In 2011, Hessler received a MacArthur Fellowship in recognition of his "keenly observed accounts of ordinary people responding to the complexities of life in such rapidly changing societies as Reform Era China.
[5] After graduating from Princeton, Hessler received a Rhodes Scholarship to study English language and literature at Mansfield College, University of Oxford.
[7] Hessler joined the Peace Corps in 1996 and was sent to China for two years to teach English at Fuling Teachers College, in a small city near the Yangtze River in Sichuan, later Chongqing municipality.
In 2013, he published Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West (2013), which, like his previous works, also covers China's ordinary people and life.
[14] In an interview upon being named a MacArthur Fellow in September 2011, he expressed his intention to spend much of the next year learning Arabic.
Because Sichuan University-Pittsburgh Institute declined to renew his teaching contract, after some of his students reported Hessler's class, he and his family moved back to Colorado at the end of the first semester of 2021.