Betty Araya / The Hofstra Chronicle

“The most obvious [reason I chose my major] would be books. Given why I’m here;  it’s what I study. I guess I read a lot of sci-fi fantasy in particular … [I’m] especially interested in, I guess, how marginalized authors approach sci-fi fantasy. Because I think we’ve seen, in the past fifteen years or so, an explosion of writers of color, women authors, LGBT authors, whereas before the genre was entirely men. So that’s something I’m really excited about. It’s something that I’d like to hopefully work in some day. Either as a writer, or an editor [or] what have you. Well, I think that … not that [sci-fi] was marginalized, but that marginalized authors were kept out of it. So it was like, for decades, just a bunch of white dudes writing and keeping everybody else out. And I guess that changed. I just read “The Left Hand of Darkness” in November, and it’s kind of a weird book to explain. It’s like, this dude gets sent off to be an ambassador of this planet of genderless people … [It] starts out as a political drama then turns into almost, but not quite, a love story. And it’s just, I don’t know, a very interesting book, so I loved that. I’ve also really loved recently “Imperial Radch” by Ann Leckie, and I read the “The Fifth Season” by N. K. Jemisin. My parents read to me a lot as a child, and it kind of took off from there. I can remember one time when I was probably in first grade, and I asked my mom to read to me. My favorite book series was Junie B. Jones, and I asked her to read one to me and she was busy. She was like, ‘You know you could probably just read that yourself, right?’ And that shook me. Not that I didn’t know I could read, but I didn’t know I could [read], like, what to me at the time was a really big book. And that was kind of like an eye-opening experience for me, when I sat down and read that book on my own for the first time. And I think everything kind of spiraled from there. I really liked reading as a kid. I was kind of socially awkward, and not good at talking to people, so I guess the books kind of filled that hole … And I think it was fourth [or] fifth grade when I really got into, like, Percy Jackson and Harry Potter, which is like the most basic answer for the book that made [me] want to read. But that sort of spurred everything, and from there I guess things just fell into place.”