"I have had what I think of as a Forrest Gump-y sort of life. I started out in East Oakland, raised mostly by my Black grandmother, just as the Black Panthers were becoming active; my White mother (I recently learned) helped to procure guns for them. We then moved to Berkeley, where my mother and White stepfather took me and my sister on the march for People’s Park, sheltered us during student riots, and set us loose in Golden Gate Park during love-ins and be-ins. When I was 5, we moved to rural British Columbia to go “back” to the land, and I spent the next years of my childhood milking cows, churning butter, bathing in a tin washtub, and reading by the light of kerosene lamps. Despite having been taken out of the school system as a child, at 16 I inveigled my way into university, dropping out two years later to start work as a magazine writer and editor. I returned to university intermittently over the years, until I eventually earned a PhD in English Literature, with a dissertation on biophilia in children’s classics. However, I continue to identify and make my living mainly as a writer."

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Read Pamela's winning Berggruen Prize Essay Competition entry at noemamag.com