Hello!

I was born behind the Iron Curtain to a family of political dissidents. We escaped when I was still very little, right after the Soviet-backed government declared martial law in Poland. We crossed from Poland to Eastern Germany god knows how, crossed Check Point Charlie from East to West Berlin, got on a train, and defected to the West in Paris. Some of my earliest memories are of that very journey, and of the tanks we left behind in the streets of Warsaw. 

I became at age 3 a child refugee on political asylum in France. Then, at age 10, I became an immigrant to Canada. I've experienced and witnessed autocratic rule, military violence, exile, poverty, hunger, discrimination, and injustice, but also the generosity and kindness of strangers.

All in all, I've lived in 11 countries so far — France, Poland, Canada, Mexico, India, Italy, the U.K., Zambia, Hungary, Hong Kong, and the U.S. — and visited over 70 others. I trekked through mountains, valleys, and deserts on five continents. Our planet and its inhabitants are, indeed, magnificent, and some. I am fluent in French, Spanish, Polish, English, and Joual. I used to be fluent in Italian, too, though I seem to have lost in the last few years most of my spoken fluency; I do, however, understand and read Italian at native level. I can get by, with caution and at a teeth-grinding slow pace, in Serbo-Croatian, Czech, Portuguese, and German. I tried my hand (and pretty much failed) at Japanese and Hindi.

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I hold a bachelor's degree in philosophy and Latin, another one in education, a British research master's degree in sociolinguistics and linguistic human rights, and a British master's in creative writing. I have, too, a master's of fine arts (MFA) in creative and narrative writing from Boston University, where I studied under Sigrid Nunez and Alicia Borinsky, who had herself studied under Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez. I've also taken graduate courses in journalism at Harvard and Stanford.

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Today, I live in the high desert and mountains of New Mexico, and work as a journalist and editor. I love animals. I love snow. I love butter. Did I say that I love chatting with strangers? It's one of my favorite things to do.

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