Beyond Well With Sheila Hamilton

Sophia Shalmiyev was eleven when she immigrated to New York City from Leningrad, motherless, displaced, and terrified. Shalmiyev is clear-eyed and unsentimental about the trauma and poverty she endured as a child and how it shaped the woman she is today as a feminist, artist, and mother. Shalmiyev is fiery and unapologetic in her views of what it takes to raise a feminist son. Her opinion of her newly adopted country is equally as compelling.  "I love America," she says, "It's broken, like me."  Shalmiyev is the author of Mother Winter, an MFA graduate of Portland State University, and a visual artist. She lives with her two children in Portland, Oregon.