Three Ws and a coda Sabrina Vourvoulias

Who

I was born in Bangkok, Thailand — the daughter of a Mexican-Guatemalan artist and an American businessman. I grew up in Guatemala (with my two brilliant brothers), and moved to the United States when I was 15. I studied filmmaking and creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., which — it has to be said — suited me for none (and every one) of the occupations I've plied since.

After living for many years in Central New York, I've lived the past decade or so near Philadelphia, with my husband (a diehard Minnesota Twins fan), a brilliant and cantankerous daughter who prefers Japanese to Spanish, and a dog whose behavior ensures a near-constant stream of expletives in English and Spanish.

What

I've done stints as everything from art gallery assistant to the director of a historic opera house, but eventually found my way, permanently, to newspapers. I've been staff writer, production coordinator, editor and managing editor at a string of local weekly newspapers in New York and Pennsylvania, and for about a year edited a monthly magazine as well.

I've been the managing editor at Al Día News Media in Philadelphia since 2012, where I edit, write and ruminate on the Latino experience in English, Spanish and Spanglish.

In the AL DÍA newsroom

In addition to news, I write speculative fiction and poetry.

My poetry has appeared in Dappled Things, Graham House Review, We'Moon, La Bloga's Floricanto online and Scheherezade's Bequest at Cabinet des Fees.

My fiction has appeared at Tor.com, Strange Horizons, Crossed Genres #24 and in the anthologies Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History; The Many Tortures of Anthony Cardno; Fat Girl in a Strange Land; Menial: Skilled Labor in Science Fiction; Crossed Genres Year Two, and upcoming in Latino/a Rising.

Reading at Taller Puertorriqueño

My novel, Ink, was published by Crossed Genres Publications Oct. 15, 2012, and was named to Latinidad's Best Books of 2012.

Reading in Brooklyn, NY

I'm a member of the Science Fiction Writers of America; the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the Pen and Pencil Club of Philadelphia.

Why

What defines home? Maybe it is at least in part the stories that deposit under your skin early enough to shape your voice. Guatemala’s rich mix of indigenous myth and Spanish Colonial legend surely shaped mine, along with its tradition of stories told in the measured cadences of poetry.

I started writing — in Spanish and English — in second grade, filling notebooks with verse and prose poems rooted in the Guatemalan landscape, both actual and imagined.

At the same time, a second set of enduring storylines was forming mine.

Guatemala was torn by an undeclared civil war. Torture, disappearances, martial law, and extrajudicial killings by paramilitary and secret police took place every day. My family guarded every word for fear that, heard by the wrong set of ears, it might result in a loved one’s apprehension or disappearance. Family friends — journalists, editors and artists — were exiled, killed or turned paraplegic in an effort to make what they were saying go away. The “official story” that appeared in state-controlled newspapers was not the story we knew with eye, head and heart.

And still, the visual art and writing that came out of Guatemala held the real, often framed by fantastical and mythological and legendary. These works, speculative and somehow full of terrible truths, became my world. They spoke clearly to what had already formed me by the time my family moved to the United States when I was 15.

I continued to write poetry, and tried my hand at films and short stories while I was at Sarah Lawrence College, where I studied film with Bill Brand, fiction with Allan Gurganus and poetry with John Skoyles and Jane Shore. I fell into news writing after school, mostly at small weeklies that served communities ignored by larger media organizations.

Marriage, motherhood, all the ways in which the United States has become the homeland of my citizenship (along with the multiplicity of stories I’ve covered during my career at newspapers) have undoubtedly been my final formation as a writer.

Yet even as I abandoned all other genres of writing for journalism, I understood there were magical, eerie and mythic stories hidden behind the words I was reporting or editing.

They whispered to me in cadences familiar and unforgotten.

In 2010 I decided to start writing them again.

Author photo courtesy of Claudia Gavin, 2015
"I wonder why poems and gods and magic alone aren’t enough. I wonder why it all depends on us, a rope of people that so often leaves a scar."

—from The Ways of Walls and Words (Tor.com, April 15, 2015)

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