Introducing Annika La Vina
* Harvard ‘25
* Specializes in short fiction and poetry, currently writing both a fantasy trilogy and a historical fiction novel.
* Drawn to concise, emotionally driven writing that emphasizes feeling over explanation.
* In high school, wrote Finding a Superpower, a story about a boy dying of cancer, which unexpectedly moved readers—including a teacher who cried while reading it aloud.
* Learned that stories can communicate universal human experiences like loss, fear, and love across differences.
* Now founder and CEO of a sports and defense technology company; graduated from Harvard after a nontraditional path that required perseverance.
* Reflects on the moral and emotional tension between developing technologies for war and writing about human vulnerability and grief.
* Finds awe, rather than beauty, in the coexistence of precision and suffering within imagination, in that totality—in the fact that imagination is capable of holding both precision and suffering without resolving either. I’d welcome the opportunity to explore those questions in conversation.
Most Certainly. How great to have Annika as my first guest on Arc of the Bard, debuting on Jan. 11. We discuss the phenomenon of storytelling, and she reads the first Chapter of her Fantasy Trilogy called Stripes.
Annika’s Books:
https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B0B9182RRM/allbooks
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