Writing, editing, teaching, special-needs parenting,
trying to be kind….
I started my journalism career as an editorial intern at El Nuevo Pais, a Spanish-language daily newspaper in Caracas, Venezuela. After a few weeks my astute editors realized my Spanish skills were too rudimentary for the newsroom. I spent the rest of the summer working with a group of very nice, very talented typesetters who pretended that my presence was actually helpful.
Since that first stutter-step as a writer, my journalism, fiction, and poetry have appeared in numerous newspapers, magazines, and literary journals, including The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, Houston Chronicle, The Forward, The Charlotte Observer, San Antonio Express-News, New Haven Register, The Connecticut Post, Albany Times-Union, Inkwell, Stand Magazine, seattlepi.com, and Till the Tide: An Anthology of Mermaid Poetry. I’ve also published personal essays about my own hybrid cultural identity, being an adoptive special needs mom, and many other topics.
In 2010 I published The History of Puerto Rico (Greenwood Press), a concise history of the island from its origins as Borinquen, homeland of the Taino people, through Spanish colonization, to its present-day status as an unincorporated U.S. territory (or freely associated state, but according to the United Nations, still essentially a colony). I’m currently working on the second edition, which will include new chapters about how the U.S. territory fared in face of an unprecedented series of natural disasters during the Trump presidency.
Over the past dozen years, I’ve expanded the focus of my professional endeavors to include serving as a columnist for Hearst Connecticut Media and as a writing teacher in a variety of learning environments, from college students to neurodivergent teens to survivors of intimate partner abuse. I’ve taught English composition, literature and journalism at Norwalk Community College, Fairfield University, and at Manhattanville College, where I earned my MFA in Creative Writing and served as a poetry editor for Inkwell Journal. Most recently, my teaching, including workshops for survivors of intimate partner abuse and sexual assault, has been supported by Westport Writers Workshop. Here’s a recent interview from the Westport Writers’ blog.
lisa pierce flores 