Mena is the author of the website www.upsidedownwritesideup.com. She has been an English and Literature teacher for seven years in the Deep South. Mena grew up a middle child of parents in love with the written word, and she likes to take care of people and animals. When she's not teaching and grading papers, she's writing essays and books and playing with her little foundling dog, Hobbes, who was a bait dog in a fighting ring.
Friends with Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, Salman Rushdie and J.M. Coetzee, witness to 27 revolutions, and journalist of the century in his native Poland–Ryszard Kapuscinski, many believe, was unlucky not to receive…