Sabrina Vourvoulias Science Fiction Author #HispanicHeritageMonth

Today we celebrate writer, editor, and educator Sabrina Vourvoulias.

From Uncanny Magazine:

Sabrina Vourvoulias has made a name for herself with smart, searing commentary on race, immigration, and issues facing the Latinx community in the Philadelphia region. As former executive editor of AL DÍA News, the publication became a “must–read for many of the city’s decision makers.” She continues to turn an unflinching eye toward these issues on her website www.sabrinavourvoulias.com and as a writer for Philadelphia Magazine. An exciting voice in speculative fiction, her work has been published in such publications as Tor.com, Strange Horizons and Crossed Genres. This year she will be included in Year’s Best YA Speculative Fiction by Twelfth Planet Press. In 2012 her novel Ink was named to Latinidad’s Best Books of 2012. Sabrina Vourvoulias’ writing is a combination of gripping prose, evocative language, and beautiful honesty. Her work isn’t always comfortable and it doesn’t always fit into a neat box, but it will echo in your soul long after the last word is read.

From the author:

Look, I grew up under a series of authoritarian military regimes in Guatemala that controlled the press, hid atrocities and genocide, and killed or tortured with impunity. Artists there, like other people with some sort of platform or amplification—journalists, unionists, community organizers, professors, priests—risked life and limb to tell the truth of what was happening to people around them. Brilliant art came from it. Art that held a mirror up to despotic governments and murderous civilian paramilitaries and said, “We see you.” Art that reaffirmed we could imagine better worlds, and then showed them to us. Art filled with voices like we’d never heard before. I think that is art’s job.

All fiction is political. All nonfiction too. Our worldview and experiences precede us to the page (even the choice to write a story is a political one), and what flows onto it is all filtered through us. What we witness, what we believe, what we think about, our ancestral teachings, our cultural references, the languages we speak, and who we speak them with.

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