Adriana ParamoAdriana Páramo is a nonfiction writer born and raised in Colombia. After spending ten years in the oil industry as a student and as a petroleum engineer, she decided to leave her homeland and moved to Alaska. In 1992 she graduated from the Universityof Alaska Anchorage as a cultural anthropologist.There, she conducted field work among Yup'ik Eskimos, an ethnochoreology, an innovative approach that linked their dances to their socio-cultural experiences. Adriana later moved to Kuwait where she taught young Muslim girls at a private school. She also engaged in advocacy of immigrant women's rights: specifically, Indian women working as servants but living in squalor in one of the wealthiest countries in the world. The results of her fieldwork, along with explorations of the lives of more privileged women living in Kuwait, evolved into Desert Butterflies, an unpublished manuscript. After four years of research in the Middle East, Adriana returned to the USA and taught Humanities and Anthropology at a college in Central Florida. She is the author of My Mother's Funeral, (CavanKerry Press) which tells the story of a Colombian family of six women struggling to triumph among poverty and neglect. Interspersed between these stories are snippets of the present life of the author, now an immigrant in the USA. Adriana volunteered her time as a transcriber for Voice of Witness, a nonprofit book series founded by author Dave Eggers, which empowers those most closely affected by contemporary social injustice. She co-produces LOL, Life Out Loud, the only reading series in Tampa Bay exclusively dedicated to nonfiction. Read More Read Less