When she was very young, Elaine Romero discovered that she had a talent for telling stories, “I was writing before I was even reading,” she recalls, “putting what I thought were letters on paper, making up m own world.” The years passed, and, now in college, Romero continued to tell stories, mostly writing poems while studying literature. “I went to a small school where everyone knew everyone else, ” she says. “The head of the theater department there came up to me and said, ‘I notice that you attend all the play we put on.’ It was true. I was going to all the performance I could, experiencing the plays in three dimensions after reading them on the page–learning that language lives in a room, and not just on a page.”
That was all it took. Soon Romero was working on plays of her own, without formal background but with a sense the possibilities of telling her stories in many voices, with a lyricism and rhythmic energy that came from those years of reading and writing poetry.