Photo Courtesy of Alana Boland

“For the past few months, I have been writing a book. It is about fashion and journalism [and] how these two industries are intertwined and how they can both benefit from each other. This book is a way of portraying myself and introducing myself to the worlds of fashion and journalism – the industries I want to go into. In this book, I will talk about my journey of getting into these fields. When it comes to fashion, I will talk about how I entered that field through social media and modeling. As for journalism, I will talk about how I originally came to Hofstra for screenwriting – I wanted to write for movies, or since I am also into theater, write scripts for the stage. I started off with drama as my major, but I didn’t like the courses, so I thought maybe I should give myself a chance to explore other kinds of writing. I said, ‘You know what? Let’s try journalism, maybe you’ll be interested in it, who knows?’ At first, I didn’t really see myself as a journalist, but then I wound up falling in love with it. In my five years of high school – because I am Italian, and we have five years of high school in Italy – I learned that two things were not going to be in my life: science and math. Those were the two things that I just could not do. They are important and I admire people who can do those things, but I cannot. I just knew I wanted to be a writer, that was my thing. I also had a goal to represent the underrepresented. I wanted to give a voice to people who look like me, but I didn’t know how to do that or what kind of writing would lend its hand to that. I eventually realized I could do that through journalism. It’s always been a dream of mine to see someone who looks like me get to tell their story – or even someone who looks differently from me but has a unique story, background or heritage – I just want to see more diversity. I started writing this book with the New Degree Press [and] I am a part of this program directed by them, and also the Creator Institute, founded by a professor, Eric Koester, from Georgetown University. I’ve been writing [the book] since, I would say, October or November, but November is when I started actually writing and doing my research. As of now, I cannot say when the book will be finished, I do not yet know when I’ll be done writing it. I will start crowdsourcing for the funds and everything, but that is a marketing strategy that we are still needing to work on. So far, I have just been working on the manuscript. Even if the deal does not go through, at least I can say that I have written a book and that 25,000 words of mine are out there in the world.”