Sylvia Savala Self-Portrait
Sylvia Savala grew up in the barrio of Pinedale, California, a suburb of Fresno, and later in the Fig Garden area . She was one of six Latinos in her graduating class at Bullard High School. The juxtaposition of these two distinct cultures: the traditional Latino, Catholic culture and the bourgeois white culture at a young age would magnify the isolation experienced in her adolescence. Later, when synthesized, it would give her the fluidity and grit necessary to break through social and artistic barriers in adulthood.
It wasn’t until Savala was in her twenties that she began to dream of becoming a visual artist. During that pursuit, she had two children, a son and a daughter. Since then, she has been fortunate to have exhibited works from Fresno to Florence, Italy. Some of her work has been published in the San Francisco Chronicle and Comstock Magazine. In 2000, she began to dream of becoming a published writer and poet. In 2007, she graduated from CSU Fresno with an MFA in Creative Nonfiction. Her essay “See How Vanilla Runs” was recently anthologized in the textbook, Introduction to MexicanAmerican Studies which is part of the curriculum of the Chicano Studies Program at Fresno City College. Another essay, “A Chicana Feminist,” was recently accepted by Routledge Press and will be included in Thirty Years of Feminist Art which is due to be released in the fall of 2010. Savala’s poetry has been published in The San Joaquin Review, Pachuco Children Hurl Stones, and In the Grove. Currently, she is writing a nonfiction novel on Pinedale and hoping with each day she’ll have the courage to tell it the way things are.
