Rose Heredia, writer

“Rose Heredia is Afro-Dominican from Billyburg, Brooklyn, New York. She currently lives in Los Angeles where she helps lawyers save the Earth. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of San Francisco and a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate Program in Writing. She is a VONA and Las Dos Brujas alumna. She is also a Culture writer for Epifania Magazine, Assistant Non-fiction Editor for VIDA Review and has been published by the Dominican Writers Association and HeadFake.”

That’s my bio and this is why I write:

I’ve always been interested in stories and writing them from early adolescence. When computers were on the verge of ubiquity in the early nineties, I wrote my first story, inspired by many of the thriller Young Adult novels I devoured late at night. I emulated a short story found in Remember Me by Christopher Pike, swapping his characters with people in my life. Through Pike’s books, I saw the scope of storytelling techniques and genres showing me how I can create my own stories using my voice.

I strive to be as authentic as possible on the page at all times through dialogue. Having grown up in New York, a city that prides itself on brutal honesty, I fall back on code-switching through dialect and language. As an Afro-Latina, I infuse themes of gender, race, and ethnicity in my work. I’m drawn to projects that are in conversation with aspects not regularly tackled in print, in media, or in films. My goal is to tackle family dynamics, urbanism and gentrification, subjectivity and interior life, and narratives of self-discovery and self-determination in my work.