Tanyo Ravicz

So I wanted to be a writer ever since I was born in the ABC Hospital in Mexico City the year JFK was sworn in, Roger Maris hit 61 homers, Hemingway shot himself, and Ham the Astrochimp beat mankind into outer space. Dr. O'Grady, when he had delivered me and asked my name, sadly looked from my mother to me and said, "Tanyo Ravicz? Es un conjunto de sonidos, pero no es nombre. That's not a name, it's a conjunction of sounds."

Story of my life. A Lutheran-Jewish-Atheist-Swedish-Romanian-American born in the ancient capital of the Aztec Empire. It was enough to get me into Harvard University 17 years later. If childhood was an extended daydream on L.A.'s beaches, Harvard was an intellectual and hormonal insanity which I fortunately survived with all of my fragments intact. You can see why after trying life in its civilized guises I moved to Alaska in search of reality. Each time I found it, I wrote about it. Over the years Alaska became, like any true love, a focus of my writing.

My books include ALASKANS: STORIES, A MAN OF HIS VILLAGE, and RING OF FIRE, with more books to come, and my fiction and essays are widely published, most recently in International Literary Quarterly. I often return to my cabin in Alaska. Today I live in California with my family. Visit my website at www.tanyo.net.