Our Last Fall

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Long Bio

Lyvia is a Puerto Rican author and screenwriter whose work centers on the contradictions and complexities of identity, faith, and belonging. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, she grew up immersed in stories: begging her father to recount tales from his childhood, tearing through every fairy tale she could find, and inventing elaborate explanations for everyday mischief. Whether claiming her brother was possessed by a demon or that an angel told her to cut up a hated school uniform, she learned early on how powerful (and dangerous) a well-told story could be.

Those stories soon became a way to navigate the paradoxes of her own life. Raised Mormon in a vibrant but colonially scarred Puerto Rican culture, and later realizing she was a lesbian, Lyvia learned to live at the intersections of identities that did not always coexist comfortably. She is deeply interested in how people hold conflicting truths: how the Mormon community can revere Christopher Columbus as divinely inspired while also carrying the generational memory of the Taíno genocide he helped orchestrate. These tensions inform her writing, where contradictions are not flaws to be fixed but realities to be explored.

Her work often weaves together Puerto Rican culture, folklore, and contemporary life with questions of belief, power, and self-definition. As an islander who hates the beach, a Mormon woman married to a woman, and someone who has spent years navigating conservative religious spaces while building a queer life she loves, Lyvia gravitates toward characters who are vibrant, flawed, and richly human. She especially enjoys writing complex women—women she wants to be, and women she can’t help but fall a little in love with.

In her late teens, unsure of her path, Lyvia tried a bit of everything: retail, art classes, music. Eventually she found her way to storytelling as a profession, earning a degree in Media Arts from Brigham Young University and a Master’s in Screenwriting from Chapman University. She went on to build a career in animation, spending nearly eight years at DreamWorks Animation before joining Netflix Animation Studios, where she currently works as an event planner. By day, she supports and celebrates her animation community; by night (and early mornings and weekends), she carves out time to write.

Drawing on her screenwriting background, Lyvia has worked on several small projects and co-wrote the kids’ web series Toca Life Stories alongside her wife. She has recently completed her first novel and is actively developing her next projects, bringing her love of structure, humor, and emotionally grounded character work from screen to page.

Lyvia tends to see her life as if it were a story: she writes down moments that make her laugh, hoards details that might one day belong to a character, and lets her mind wander through strange hypotheticals. All the contradictions that once felt like liabilities (Puerto Rican and “too gringa,” Mormon and not Mormon enough, queer in spaces that weren’t built for her) have become the raw material of her creative life. The result is an author with stories bursting at the seams, determined to craft narratives that are as layered, messy, and as alive as the world that made her.

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