Aliviana Sanders’ first writing project (around the age of 7) was a sequel to the Little House on the Prairie series. However, the project went unfinished and Aliviana turned to other hobbies, focusing mainly on playing different musical instruments. Growing up in the suburbs of Los Angeles, thousands of artistic opportunities were available; she dabbled in painting, photography, and theatre but nothing really clicked. It wasn’t until her junior year of college that she rediscovered her love of writing and decided to major in USC’s Creative Writing program. Again, the journey was rocky. She took a fiction class that felt more like a requirement than anything else. Feeling burned out already, she left the country to study in Spain for five months, leaving her writing far away in Los Angeles.
At the beginning of her senior year, Aliviana hesitantly signed up for her first poetry workshop requirement. She had little experience with poetry other than the nonsense her emo friends scrawled into their notebooks in high school, and was not exactly looking forward to the semester. She was completely unprepared for the revelation of everything she had been missing over the years. Thanks to the efforts of two fabulous professors (Molly Bendall and David St. John) and an incredibly talented group of classmates, Aliviana was able to experience real poetry and discovered she had both the talent to compose and the desire to read and write all different kinds of poetry.
This summer, Aliviana will be promoting AIDS prevention in a remote village in Zanzibar, then will hopefully come back to a position as a corps member of City Year Los Angeles, working with underserved kids on staying in school and succeeding in their classes. She hopes to be an elementary school teacher, but deferred her acceptance into USC’s Rossier School of Education to gain some hands on experience working with kids and to experience life outside of a university for a year. She fully plans on coming back for her master’s degree in education and hopes that these experiences continue to provide her with lots of inspiration for new poems.
