Sandra Rodriguez Barron

Hi! Thank you for visiting my page. I'm a mother, wife, step-mother, dog-mother and resident of Southern Connecticut. I love to hike, cook, do artsy stuff, and explore new places. I'm a very changeable and dynamic (as opposed to static) reader. I read novels, of course, but I also make sure I consume heavy doses of short stories and contemporary poetry. I flow with what's going on in my life, but if I had to come up with a short list of books that have deeply affected me, I would pick:

1. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery -- This book connects me to my grandmother and to my son in a way that is so simple yet so profound; it's like a gold watch to be passed down through the generations.

2&3. The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- These books taught me that family dysfunction makes for great fiction! It also made me see that it can be funny. My motto as a writer is "if you can't hide the family skeletons, you might as well make them dance."

4. Endless Love by Scott Spencer -- Did you know this wasn't a cheesy, after-school-special type book? It's a literary heavy-weight and was a finalist for the National Book Award. My novel-in-progress is about about a college girl who goes to France and falls in love with an older man. The powerful, moving language of Endless Love has been incubating inside me (what Robert Olen Butler calls "the compost pile of the mind") since I first read it at age fourteen. As for biographical stuff, I was born in Puerto Rico but grew up mostly in Connecticut and in El Salvador (and for short periods in the Dominican Republic and the South of France.) I graduated from UConn and received a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Degree from Florida International University in Miami. These days, I teach graduate students in the Western Connecticut Low-residency Master of Fine Arts Program.