Eleni N. Gage

The daughter of a Greek father and a Minnesotan mother, Eleni Gage grew up in Athens, Greece, and Worcester, Massachusetts, and has always been fascinated by cultural rituals, traditions, and syncretisms. That interest led her to study Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University as an undergraduate, and, eventually, to earn an equally practical master's degree, an MFA in Creative Writing, Fiction, from Columbia University. It may have also nudged her to marry the first Nicaraguan she ever met, a coffee trader.

Now the Executive Editor of Martha Stewart Weddings magazine and a freelance writer whose travel articles have appeared on the covers of Travel+Leisure, T, Budget Travel, and Town&Country Travel, Eleni has also contributed to Real Simple, the New York Times, Parade, and The American Scholar, and held staff positions at Allure, Elle, InStyle and People magazines. She is the author of the travel memoir North of Ithaka, which describes the year she spent living in a Greek mountain village overseeing the rebuilding of her grandparents' house, and the novel Other Waters, which details the life of Maya Das, an Indian-American psychiatrist who thinks that her family has been cursed, as she struggles to forge a single identity while torn between two cultures. Her upcoming novel, The Ladies of Managua, follows three generations of women, each with her own secret, as they're forced to confront their complicated relationships to each other and to their homeland, Nicaragua. Having spent much of the last decade in Greece, Nicaragua, and Miami, Eleni now lives in New York with her husband and their Greekaraguan daughter.