Yurina Melara
AUTHOR

Yurina Melara

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Yurina Melara Valiulis, Ph.D., is a Salvadoran American writer and journalist originally from San Salvador and based in Los Angeles. Her fiction is rooted in El Salvador and explores power, identity, social change, political conflict, and the ways Salvadorans imagine their past and future.

She is the author of the Todo Personal trilogy, a political fiction series that follows the intertwined lives of journalists, political leaders, and families navigating ambition, violence, love, and power in contemporary El Salvador. She is also the author of El Salvador 2125, a young adult science fiction novel that reimagines the country one hundred years in the future, blending suspense, climate change, biotechnology, and questions about inequality and the future of Latin America.

Melara works in collaboration with Ojo de Cuervo, a women-centered Salvadoran imprint committed to creating space for women’s voices and stories. Through her fiction, she seeks to contribute to a growing body of literature that allows Salvadorans and Latin Americans to tell their own stories and imagine their own futures.

Before turning increasingly toward fiction, Melara spent more than two decades in journalism and communications. She worked for Diario El Mundo in El Salvador, Wave Community Newspapers, and for more than ten years at La Opinión in Los Angeles, where she reported extensively on public health and social issues. Her journalism and experience covering Latino communities continue to influence the social and political worlds she creates in her novels.

She currently lives in Los Angeles with her family and continues to write fiction inspired by El Salvador, its people, its contradictions, and its possibilities.
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