Joanna Eleftheriou

I'm Joanna Eleftheriou, and I wrote THIS WAY BACK to tell the story of my life as a Greek-American girl who left New York city for a little Greek village. I eventually came to love the village, and I also fell in love with Greek music, Greek dancing -- and girls. I returned to America where I felt safe as a lesbian, and through telling my story I made a place for myself where there was none. As a professor in Houston, I taught at a state prison and an essay about that appears in the 2023 anthology CARCERAL LIBERALISMS.