With my sweet dad
My imagination’s often gotten the better of me. Maybe that’s because I was a shy kid who spent a lot of time in her own head, a place where I could fixate on all sorts of improbable scenarios. As an adult, however, I’ve learned to use these powers for good, deploying my creativity and verbal ability to bring people together—whether it’s to foster understanding, promote action, or simply celebrate our common humanity. There’s plenty of angst in the world already; I’d rather spend my time on more life-affirming pursuits. (For a more traditional recap of my professional life, please see the bio below.)
Biography
An award-winning writer and editor with 30 years of journalism and editorial experience, Sofia Perez has worked in just about every type of genre and medium—from broadcast news and print journalism (magazines, newspapers, and web publications), to fiction, children’s programming, entertainment, and documentaries—as well as providing editorial services to a range of businesses and nonprofit organizations.
An early indication that I would write about food?
Her journalism work—which focuses primarily on food, wine, the arts, travel, the environment, and Spain—has appeared in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Condé Nast Traveler, BBC Travel, Literary Hub, The New York Times, Food & Wine, Saveur (where she previously worked as deputy editor and editor-at-large), and Gourmet (where she was a research editor). Sofia was named a finalist for the 2023 American Society of Journalists & Authors writing awards, in the food and drink category. In 2006, she was honored in Pamplona, Spain, where she received the Premios Internacionales EVA “Journalist-Communicator of the Year” award, and was a finalist for the 2003 Greenbrier Scholarship for Professional Food Writers.
She has worked as a Spanish translator and interpreter for a variety of individuals and organizations (including chef Ferran Adrià and HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver), and serves as a judge for the James Beard Foundation Book & Journalism Awards. She is also an Assistant Professor at NYC’s Pratt Institute, teaching management communications in the school’s graduate Design Management program, and has taught food-writing classes at New York City’s Institute of Culinary Education.
Beyond the journalistic and educational realms, Sofia has completed So This Is How It Ends, a historical novel about the Spanish Civil War, and she is starting to write a memoir about growing up as a first-generation American in New York City in the 1970s and 80s.
On the editorial consulting side, she is a principal in the firm Counterpoise and a board member for the national nonprofit Clark Hulings Fund for Visual Artists, where she has taught communications and storytelling. She also provides editorial services to the international conservation group Rainforest Alliance (where she was previously the director of communications), as well as to other nonprofits, entrepreneurs, and corporate clients.
Her career began in broadcast journalism, at the NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw and the Today show. After leaving television news, she went on to write and produce documentaries, entertainment shows, and educational programs for children, such as PBS’ Reading Rainbow and A&E’s Biography for Kids.
Although Sofia is a born-and-bred New Yorker, she’s also extremely proud to be the child of two remarkable Spaniards. Fluent in her parents’ native language and proficient in French, she holds a B.A. in English literature from Princeton University, but the school she is most happy to have attended is Hunter College High School in Manhattan, where her graduating class chose a mollusk as its senior mascot.
[Ed. Note: The design at right—which appears on the top lefthand corner of every page here—is known as a triskele (in Spanish, trisquel). It is an ancient Celtic symbol that represents many different ideas, including the cyclical nature of life as well as the trinities of birth-death-rebirth and sky-sea-earth. Widely displayed throughout Galicia, Spain, where my parents were raised, it honors the region’s Celtic past, and also figures prominently in my novel, So This Is How It Ends.]