ABOUT ME

Acclaimed writer, novelist, and playwright Leta Serafim has had a long and storied career in a world of words. She was a journalist at the Los Angeles Times Washington Bureau before moving to Greece, where she taught art and illustrated books. Upon her return to the United States, she wrote feature stories for the Boston Globe before trying her hand at fiction, which resulted in the popular Greek Islands Mysteries series. She continues to spend her summers in Greece.

The daughter of an itinerant scientist, Leta spent the first years of her life in San Diego, before moving to Washington, D.C. upon the creation of NASA when her father went to work for the agency. A genuine rocket scientist, he served there for twenty-five years in many capacities—Director of Unmanned Space, Director of Astronomy, Associate Administrator, and Chief Scientist, and supervised the American missions to Venus, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter. Leta's memories are of a house that was always excitingly littered with models of space ships and missiles, and of Thanksgiving guests who talked more about about ‘thrust and payload’ than the turkey—and in a multitude of tongues (it was her father's firm belief that the language of American science was "broken English").

Leta attended Wells College in upstate New York for two years before transferring to George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where she graduated with a degree in political science and Russian studies, with a focus on Dostoyevsky, Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn. She worked at the Washington Post while in college, writing obituaries and doing research for the national desk, before leaving to join the staff of the Los Angeles Times Washington Bureau.

Following her marriage to a Greek national, Philip Serafim, Leta moved to Athens, where she taught art while at home with her small children, daughters Amalia and Annie. Upon return to the U.S., she wrote for local papers and sporadically for the Boston Globe. Philip, meanwhile, taught electrical engineering at Northeastern University for over 30 years and rivaled the best minds in NASA in his brilliance. His belief in Leta was unswerving, and he never wavered in his encouragement and support. "Without him," comments Leta, "I never would have finished a single page, let alone completed a book."

Currently, Leta spends at least one month each year in Greece, where to date she has visited over 33 islands and lived among its residents. She spends her spare time traveling, painting in both oils and acrylics, etching, cooking in Greek and other International cuisines, and spending many joyful hours with her children and grandchildren.
 

Leta is the author of The Devil Takes Half, When the Devil’s Idle, To Look on Death No More, From the Devil’s Farm, and An Evil Most Welcome (all from Coffeetown Press), as well as the children's book Molly Saw a Bear. 
 

She is also the author of the new play Requiem, a two-act drama about Russian poet Anna Akhmatova.