Gypsy D. Guillén was born on September 15, 1975 in a bright, lively place, a bittersweet land of rum and sugarcane. It is a place where people dance to their sorrows and bathe away bad luck in the salty waters of the Caribbean Sea. It is an island country where passions burn as strongly as the sun and the chaos of poverty and corruption are the only clouds in the skies.

The Dominican Republic was her cradle and New York City her field of exploration. Propelled by engaging dinner discussions on news and social issues that were often led by her journalist father, Ms. Guillén developed an early love of information, its elaboration and dissemination which she seriously pursued by studying journalism at New York University. Nonetheless, her first love in print was poetry, which she’s been writing since her early teens and has published in the National Library of Poetry Anthology and Urban Latino magazine. Ms. Guillén, 27 years old, has worked as a translator, editor and reporter at several national news outlets.