It is just before dawn. The song in my dream calls me to the piano. Who will sing this melody? Will it be Sor Juana, the seventeenth-century Mexican nun who fought for the rights of girls to be educated? Perhaps it is Aileen Wuornos, meeting her fate on death row after suffering a lifetime of trauma. It could also be the silence of three bystanders bearing witness to violence, but too afraid to act, or the inner workings of Helen Keller’s brilliant mind, calling out racism, ableism and other “isms”, although she couldn’t see the color of my skin.   

These are the subjects of my operas.