By Francisco Omar Fernandez Rodriguez Editorial Staff What is your academic and professional background? I have an M.F.A. in creative writing from UMass Amherst in fiction. I write fiction and … what’s called creative or literary nonfiction, which are personal essays - memoir, in my case. I taught at Hofstra University in Long Island for many years. I ran the M.F.A. program in creative writing there and the administration at some point decided to no longer fund that program, at which point I came here, and I have been here since the fall of 2015. I teach a number of creative writing courses in the prose genre - life writing, fiction writing, 200-level intro to creative writing, a 200-level writing fiction and creative nonfiction course. I teach a seminar in creative writing which I think is the only course that focuses on once students have a finished piece - what to do with it, how to find a market for it, how to research that and send it into the world. I also developed a course for the University called Disability in Literature, which looks at how disabled bodies have been defined in literature and who makes those decisions, and what the literature of disability has to say about differently abled bodies over the course of many, many years. What projects are you working on? I’m almost done with a book. I had a book about a couple of years ago and I’m almost done with a new one. It’s a memoir in a series of essays, and it has to do with my experience. I write personal essays. So a few years ago, my husband and I were both diagnosed with cancer a few months apart. So it’s about simultaneously being a cancer patient and a caretaker, and it’s also a little bit about survivor guilt because I survived and he did not. And so as I was going through this experience, which overlapped with the pandemic, I was thinking a lot about what does it mean to survive this experience? What do I mean by survive? And what do I even mean by me? Will I even be the same person coming out of this experience as going into it? So they’re really a series of essays about ordinary things like hurricanes, or pizza, or subway dances, but I’m looking at this through the lens of health and healing and cancer and survivorship. And there are 14 - they are structured around the seven deadly sins and the seven virtues. There are 14 essays and I am currently at work on the 14th. That is what I’m working on now. A few of them have been published. That was not easy, but the easy things aren’t worth writing about, I think. They’re already resolved. No conflict, no story, right? Do you have a favorite book or piece of literature? As a child, I think one of the books that really moved me was this book called “D’Aulaires, Book of Greek Myths,” and I like how weirdly illustrated it was, like how the monsters look like baked potatoes and it’s just strange. But I also really liked that there was space for women, because I grew up in the era of the superhero, and all the superheroes were male and all the cartoon characters were male. But here was this book, and here’s Athena, and here’s Artemis, and they’re just, you know, powerful and wild. And I thought, “Oh, there’s space here for female protagonists.” So I loved that. And I also loved “Little Women” because it was about a young woman who grew up poor, and wanted to be a writer, and so I identified with that. And as an adult, I cannot get enough Virginia Woolf in my life. What are your hobbies? I like to cook. I like going to farmers’ markets and seeing what’s in season and inventing things from it. And during the pandemic, when we all couldn’t go anywhere, I started paying attention to birds, and I like birds. Now I walk around and I look at birds and listen to them, and it was a way of trying to stay calm and focused in a crazy world. I wouldn’t call myself a birder. I don’t think I’m that far along, but I like just walking around, paying attention to different types of birds, noticing them, taking pictures, and listening to their songs. What advice would you offer students? Do what you love. And if you don’t know what you love, college is such a great opportunity to try a whole bunch of different things, because when else could you get to do that? And then you can find what you love and do that. Life is short, and you don’t want to spend your life doing what you love third best.