Erica Verrillo was born in Rochester, New York on May 10th (Mother’s Day), 1953, during the height of the McCarthy era. (According to the testimony of sworn witnesses, she was born “rosy” not “pink.”) She is the oldest of three surviving children. Her parents, both classical musicians, named her after famed violinist, Erica Morini. In keeping with her namesake, Verrillo studied piano with her mother as a young child, and then flute with John Oberbrunner. At age seventeen she moved to England, where she played in the Oxford Symphony Orchestra and studied with Gareth Morris, principal flutist of the Philharmonia Orchestra. A year later she moved back to the U.S. where she attended New England Conservatory as a student of James Pappoutsakis.

Although Verrillo’s first love was music, she decided against the professional musician’s life for reasons that “had nothing to do with long, grueling hours followed by no pay.” After two years, she transferred to Tufts University, where she majored in Latin American History and studied poetry with Mary Baron and Denise Levertov.

“I was a very bad poet,” confesses Verrillo. “But the training I got was invaluable. Baron challenged everything I put into print. I had to justify every word, every phrase, every line break. Even punctuation came under fire. To this day, I can’t write a semicolon without a deep sense of futility.”

Verrillo finished her college education from Mexico, where she attended the Universidad de Las Americas in Puebla. Soon after receiving her BA from Tufts, she set out to explore Latin America on foot, hitchhiking through Central America, over the Andes to Argentina, and finally to Brazil. She describes her two-and-a-half-year sojourn as “The Motorcycle Diaries, without the motorcycle.”

“I went everywhere, from the headwaters of the Amazon to remote villages built on Inca ruins high in the Peruvian Andes.” When asked what her most memorable experience was, Verrillo says it was being offered a six-foot spear by a Huaorani warrior in the Amazon. “I didn’t think I could hitchhike with a spear. Otherwise I would have taken it.”

In 1977 Verrillo returned home to upstate New York, with the idea of attending medical school. “After seeing how desperate people were for medical care in the Andes, I felt I should not go back to Latin America unless I could be useful.” Unfortunately, Verrillo discovered that she fainted at the sight of blood. She then turned to applied linguistics with the idea of becoming an English teacher. “Teaching ESL is not as useful as medicine,” she admits. “But it’s probably more practical than becoming a belly dancer.”

The day after Verrillo completed her M.A. in linguistics at Syracuse University, she moved to Manhattan. Verrillo’s day job was teaching English as a Second Language at the World Trade Center, but at night she performed in a Middle Eastern dance troupe. (“Don’t look at me like that,” says Verrillo. “It was ethnic.”) Setting out with a fellow dancer in 1981, Verrillo visited Morocco in order to become better acquainted with the Tuareg Berbers, who later provided inspiration for the Blue People of Elissa’s Quest.

“I realized at that point that I was simply going to have to go everywhere, meet everybody, speak every language. The world is a big, fascinating place, and I wanted to see it all--any way I could. Even if that meant going to grad school.”

In 1982 Verrillo entered SUNY Albany’s Ph.D. program in Anthropology, where she became linguistic supervisor of the Albany-Chiapas project, an eighteen-month field project among the Chamulas in southern Mexico.

“There was typhoid, giardia, and amoebas in the water--all of which I got. There were poisonous snakes, tarantulas and insects that burrowed under your skin. I fell asleep at night to the sounds of howler monkeys and bombs dropping. Ah,” reminisces Verrillo, "those were the days.”

During the early 80s, Guatemala going through the “La Violencia” during which Mayan Indians were targeted by the right-wing government of Rios Montt. Hundreds of thousands of Mayas fled across the Mexican border as Guatemalan troops destroyed their homes, crops and families. Verrillo happened to be working among a group of Chamulas living along the border when the flood of refugees began. Her knowledge of both Spanish and Tzotzil led her to work as an interpreter for an ABC news team and numerous international journalists.

“I ran into a lot of flak for helping journalists,” says Verrillo. “Mexican officials were looking for targets. They thought we worked for the CIA one minute, and the guerillas the next. But all we wanted to do was get the word out. A lot of people were starving.”

Verrillo soon turned her energies to refugee aid. In 1984 she founded the Guatemalan Refugee Crafts Project, a weaving co-op funded initially by Seva Foundation. As Verrillo describes it, the idea was to make an aid organization which was fully self-sufficient. Over the next ten years, Verrillo earned over $100,000, “every penny” of which she sent to the camps.

“It was a wonderful project. The refugees organized it themselves, distributed the thread, determined how the money should be distributed—in all cases equally-- and arranged for shipping. They were very efficient, very trustworthy. It was a joy to work with them.”

Verrillo continued making yearly trips to the camps, but by now she had two children, making a long stay unfeasible. Once again, she resumed work on her Ph.D. at UT Austin, this time in Speech Communication, where she combined her knowledge of linguistics with anthropology. But, in 1992, disaster struck. After several bouts with tropical diseases in Guatemala, Verrillo fell ill one last time, never to recover.

“I had to let everything go--the PhD, the refugee project, my husband, my home, everything. It was the end,” says Verrillo. “But it was also the beginning. Being ill for so many years makes you re-evaluate your priorities. It’s amazing how many things just aren’t important.”