Award-Winning Writing – Sophia Fratta

Ballad for Lorna

I love plants like teenage girls love Harry Styles. My friends—who turn the volume to blasting when Harry comes on the radio—patiently listen to me daydream about whatever my newest botanical crush is—mushroom music on YouTube, maybe, or air plants in the Peruvian desert. Someday, my friends joke, I’ll stop introducing myself as Sophia with a “ph” and start introducing myself as Sophia with a PhD. I laugh when they say this, but there’s a sense of trepidation about my future career I can’t shake.

Theseus: Dialogue on Conservation

OUTIS: Socrates, hi. I’m Outis.

SOCRATES: Χαῖρε—

OUTIS: English, please.

SOCRATES: Er—hello. You said you were Outis? As in Nobody?

A New Threat in the Montes: The Legacy of Conflict in Colombia’s Agricultural Communities

“Everything had been lost,” read the transcripts. “We just had fear, fear, fear.”

In Pichilín, a small town in Colombia’s Montes de María, decades of violence have left lasting scars—and an unpleasant threat to the population’s future.

Hello Again, Trieste

After the first recorded whale fall, 1977

We say goodbye, lying.

Still there might be

a moment of sadness at her turning—

the great blue wash of her fin

a fading wave.

A Glimpse of the Universe: A History of Lichens and Ourselves

Amorphous in their beauty, beautiful in their amorphousness, lichens run Mars-red and sun-yellow. Sometimes moldy, sometimes mossy, they bloom in delicate curls of green and gray. Those rusty stains on the sidewalk by your house, pale leaflets creeping up the tree in your yard, puckered cups between the slats of your fence? Once you know what to look for, they’re everywhere. But the public spotlight on lichens is recent compared to other species. In fact, lichens only entered the academic scene in the late nineteenth century, thanks to Simon Schwenderer, the son of a Swiss farmer. On a crisp morning in 1867, the fresh-faced Schwenderer, as the newly minted director of the botanical gardens in Basel, Switzerland, proposed a hypothesis that would change the biological world.

abstract: biophilia hypothesis

Past-tense panacea: that is to say, sunlight dripping through tall savanna grasses of northern Africa. Two and a half million years ago, a face that was not so different from your face smiled through golden stalks. The earth was already older than there are atoms in your body, and it smelled thick and sweet with dew. The face had already learned to walk, to eat, to listen, to watch the sun rise and set. Somewhere between the grasses, her child cries out. The face directs the child’s gaze from the burning sun to the stirring plain.

Neither here nor there

This is a flight from Paris, France, to Dublin, Ireland. My legs are packed tight in the slot between my chair and the framework of the chair in front of me, my face already pressed against the four inches of glass on the side of this airplane. I stare at the world and the world stares back.

Serratia, Mi Encanto: How Biological Control Agents Can Mitigate Colombia’s P. cinnamomi Crisis

In Disney’s new film Encanto, Colombian singer Carlos Vives describes Colombia as a paradise. “Todos llegan para gozar,” he sings–everyone comes to enjoy Colombia’s bounty. Despites its relative prosperity as an upper middle income country, however, Colombia’s development has been lopsided. Its income distribution is heavily weighted towards the top-earning 10% of the population, who, as of 2019, hold 40.3% of the country’s wealth–leaving 42.5% of the population beneath the poverty line and 15.1% of the population in extreme poverty. Most of this poverty is concentrated in Colombia’s rural districts, whose populations mainly comprise small subsistence farmers. This places Colombia at seventh in the world for income inequality.

Pineapple Upside-Down

Julio says the Americans tear him apart like he’s a weed and then he sucks on his lollipop, viciously, like he wishes he could grey his lungs with tobacco. We stare out the window at the dead street. Nothing grows here, not money or weeds or the wax palms of el Quindio, the ones Julio tells me about. Higher than the Eiffel Tower, he says, combing their fronds through the sky, grasping. Sometimes, I can see them in my head, hazy and vivid like a dream.