I grew up between two very different worlds. Greece taught me to notice life around me; the way places hold memories, how coastlines slow down time, how entire conversations happen around a table with everyone saying exactly what they mean. New York taught me to notice everything else.

I wrote poetry for years before slowly finding my way into short stories. In college, I wrote as a columnist for a few start-up magazine publications and started realizing that the subject itself wasn't all that interesting. It was the people inside of the story. Their contradictions. The things they said versus what they meant.

I studied criminology at John Jay before earning a degree in psychology from St. John’s, mostly because I’ve always been attracted to what makes people capable of doing what they do. That curiosity followed me way past school.

I spent years working in hospitality and New York nightlife, where humans have a tendency to reveal themselves after midnight. I eventually opened a breakfast eatery of my own, which meant I got to observe them in the morning, too. Both ventures probably taught me more about human behavior than either degree did.

Now I live in South Florida, where my life looks considerably different. I work on residential design projects, homeschool, raise three boys under five, and write in the margins of all of it. I’m currently working on my first psychological thriller, although short stories will probably always be the way I make sense of an idea before I know what I want to do with it.

My writing circles real things: relationships, deception, questionable decisions, private justifications, and the strange ease of how people can convince themselves they’re doing the right thing. I write about the stories people don’t tell out loud. Maybe that comes from studying psychology. Maybe it comes from years of watching people across bars and restaurant tables.

My memories of Europe still find their way into the atmosphere of what I write. New York tends to give it its shadow. And somewhere between the two is usually where I find the story.


Contact: tatianagrigo.vitas@gmail.com