By Teresa Roca

Standing at the podium, with her eyes fixated on the page in front of her, Katherine Vaz reads an excerpt from her upcoming novel “Below the Salt.” As she reads, the seated audience remains still. No cell phones vibrate. No one shifts in his or her chair. The only sound in the room is of the words that captivate the audience. As she portrays the themes of death and tragedy through these words, she is able to evoke emotion from her listeners. This talent makes her the critically acclaimed author she is today.

“It’s really hard to write fiction that doesn’t have those issues that connect to loss,” said Vaz. “Death is going to happen.”

Growing up in Oakland, California in the late ’60s, the issues of race and the Vietnam War plagued her community. After hearing stories of her grandmother’s death, how her mother was born dead then brought back to life, and experiencing her grandfather’s passing first hand, death has been prevalent throughout her life.

“I don’t think I am unusual or different. I tend to think of death as just plain life,” said Vaz.

“Taking a Stitch to a Dead Man’s Arm,” the first short story in her collection “Our Lady of the Artichokes and Other Portuguese American Stories,” is inspired by experiences from Vaz’s childhood such as taking the bus to school, forming a friendship of protection with another student, and her relationship with her father. Vaz took her father’s fear of the dark and a family myth to create a fictional story bigger than the truth it came from.

“It’s completely fictional. I am not that character at all,” said Vaz. “That is the thing about fiction, it is not an autobiography, but you do draw on essences.”

Vaz knew she wanted to be a writer at the age of 12. From 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., Vaz would spend her workdays giving herself writing exercises such as copying paragraphs to see the construction and writing short stories in a specific time span. Although she did not save one word from these exercises, this is how Vaz learned to write.

“I can even see the moment where that wasn’t just what I wanted to do, but who I was,” said Vaz.

After years of having her short stories published in literary magazines, Vaz was accepted into the MFA program at the University of California at Irvine in her early 30s. Her thesis, which drew on her past experiences, as opposed to conventional topics, became her first novel entitled “Saudade.” This novel portrays a young woman’s struggle with self-expression in a world with no sound. Her second book, “Mariana,” depicts the true story of a nun who wrote love letters that many people believe to be the most passionate documents in history. This novel received widespread popularity. It was printed in seven editions, six languages and remained on the bestsellers list in Portugal for years.

Aside from writing, Vaz dedicated her time to a teaching fellowship at Harvard University for five years. During that time, she also did a fellowship at Radcliff Institute for Advanced Study.

With a religious family that practiced the catholic faith, Vaz grew up learning about saints and their crucial role in her culture. The use of miracles and religious beliefs regarding saints are two consistent themes found throughout her work.

“I grew up with the stories of the saints,” said Vaz. “They were real people who had miraculous things happen, things phenomenal to me. I realize they’re mythological, but it does introduce the possibility that extraordinary things can exist the real world. ”

Her ability to present old Portuguese-American traditions and catholic beliefs, while understanding the complexities of life, has made her an award-winning author.

She won the 1997 Drue Heinz Literature Prize for her first short story collection “Fado & Other Stories” and was the 2007 winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction for “Our Lady of the Artichokes and Other Portuguese American Stories.”

When asked how Vaz knows that her readers will be interested in the topics she writes about, she replied, “I feel and give weight to what’s important to me, what do I need to get across to people. You explore that and are not confined by having to report this is the way the incident happened. It is not about what I share about myself, what happened to me. It is about what I have in my heart that I manifest in the world, what I want to find as a story.”