The Strange Travels of Svinhilde Wilson

Stephanie V Sears is a dual national: French and American, born in Manhattan, NY, to an American diplomat/political analyst from Massachusetts and French mother from Aquitaine, France, who was employed at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and later at the UN. After first going to school in the United States in Massachusetts and Washington DC, Stephanie's high school years took place in France where she earned her Baccalaureate with honors. Much of her life after that has been a back and forth between both countries for university studies, family and professional reasons. She continues to share her time equally between both countries. Brought up in a culturally un-prejudiced family atmosphere, with a somewhat romantic sense of the world, it is no wonder that after a Masters at the Sorbonne (Paris V) in socio-history, she went towards ethnology (specializing in Polynesian cultures - specifically: the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia) with a PhD (Doctorate) from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. As a pre-doctoral student and as a post-doctor she worked in several museums: in the United States (Metropolitan Museum of Art) and in France (Musee de l'Homme, Paris, Musee de la Castre, Cannes, Musee d'Histoire Naturelle, Colmar but also for a think tank in Paris involved in the promotion of democracy, and on a Peruvian project for Cultural Survival, in Boston. Her first publications were scholarly in nature, related to her thesis. Her first publications encouraged her to expand her focus to environmental issues and to the overall changing relationship between human society and wildlife, with occasional departures into more socio-cultural subjects. As an equestrian, horse cultures in Syria, Kirghizstan, Turkmenistan were also subjects of interest. An on-going love of adventure, possibly inherited from a long line of accomplished seamen on both sides of her family, and a curiosity for other cultural perspectives than her own, have led her to live in Hong Kong where she sold advertising space in a children's magazine, the Marquesas Islands, Barcelona where she wrote for the Barcelona Metropolitan, a local, English language, cultural tourism magazine: She also lived in New York, Paris, Boston and Verona. She continues to travel extensively throughout the world where landscapes, people, occasional odd circumstances have been a constant source of poetic and story-telling inspiration. Until now and by far, Central and East Asia and the Pacific islands have exerted their particular spell on her. Poetry became an interest at the age of fourteen, as an escape from algebra classes. The first lines written were no doubt heavily influenced by Arthur Rimbaud and written in French. Other admired poets include Byron, Eugenio Montale, Paul Valery, Rilke, Borges, Octavio Paz, Holderlin. Though is by no means an exhaustive list of the poets she admires and keeps discovering, alive and dead. Later, she wrote poetry, once paternal reading suggestions in the great English Classic but also in North and South American and Russian literature had made her more fluent in her second language, Her poems have been published in some forty literary magazines and reviews, with a Pushcart short-list nomination in the Hudson View, and two short-list nominations in Erbacce contests.