Hey, I'm Cristina

All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow. — Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Hello there, I’m Cristina, a writer of true and not-so-true stories living in Pittsburgh. My work examines the complexities of relationships and identity through disability and immigrant experiences, often dealing with language, family dynamics, and power structures. How I ended up writing about these topics is a long and convoluted story.

I was born and raised in upstate New York to Brazilian parents who never quite got used to the cold. My father wore two parkas to his university job during the winter and always told me to put on a coat before going out, regardless of the temperature. My family, like most immigrant families, spoke Portuguese and English at home.

Language and culture became dominant themes of my life after my parents discovered my deafness at six months. I spent the next decades straddling different worlds, moving between American, Deaf, and Brazilian cultures and shifting between English, American Sign Language, and Portuguese. Life became even more complicated when I became one of the first children to receive a cochlear implant, a bionic ear that enables limited sensations of sound, as the Deaf community debated cochlear implants and cultural autonomy.

Ever the nerd, I somehow ended up in law school, became a lawyer, and worked in the private, nonprofit, and government sectors. As my ambivalence toward my chosen career increased, my progressive blindness suddenly worsened. (I have Usher Syndrome, which includes deafness and gradual vision loss, one of the main causes of DeafBlindness.) I paused my legal career to learn how to live as a DeafBlind person: read Braille, cook by touch, and navigate with a white cane.

The period of adjustment compelled me to consider whether I wanted to go back to law. The answer was no, and I returned to my passion for storytelling. After multiple false starts and dead ends, I realized that I wanted to explore the psychology of difference and language through disability and immigration. After learning Protactile, an emerging touch-based language of the DeafBlind, I gained more confidence and competency in my communication and navigation skills and began attending a low-residency MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Over time, I sharpened my ideas and craft so I can tell these best stories I can.

When I’m not writing or reading, I’m practicing yoga and battling the weeds on my front patch of concrete (and losing).