
Sevasti Boutos
Author
Sevasti ( Sevi) Boutos was born and raised in Melissia, eight miles north of Athens, Greece.
She studied veterinary medicine and practiced for fifteen years in a clinic in Melissia before entering the States in 1988.
Her path in New York, where she has lived since the first day she immigrated, has been challenging.
Starting from scratch, educating herself at Hunter College of CUNY,
she graduated with honors and worked for ten years as a coordinator in educational technologies at Barnard College.
In her early college years in Greece, her passion for poetry flourished as a counteraction against the dictatorship
established in her homeland for seven years.
Then an esoteric power-like voice alerted her to express her anger with words.
She began writing on the textbooks' pages about the suspicion of being arrested by the dictators and their college followers. She shared her poetry only with trustworthy people for a long time until she started addressing them in friends' circles.
At that time, she used to write only in Greek.
The first poetry collection, "My Two Homelands," is written in Greek
and was published in May 2005.
It appeared in several magazines in Greece, like Piraika Grammata, Aeginea, and Ellinorama.
One of the poems, "Olympic armistice." has awarded recognition -Special Award for Culture and Peace for the poetry, on November 27, 2005, from Unesco.
Sevi lived many summers in Aegina, an island close to Athens, where her maternal grandparents lived in ample land on the top of a plateau facing the Saronic Gulf.
Climbing all kinds of trees, like almonds, pistachios, and figs, to get seeds and fruits
or catching cicadas gently, squeezing the thorax with the thumb and forefinger, making them stop that buzzing sound, involved unconsciously enriching her spirit.
Trying all kinds of grapes, yet smelling the aroma from the thyme and oregano
touched her profoundly.
Above all was the experience she had to feed some domesticated animals like goats, sheep,
and a donkey her grandparents raised, besides poultry, pigeons, rabbits that influenced her later
to become a veterinarian.
Her grandparents' warm gestures and love, treating her with affection, had a cognitive impact
upon her ethos and lifestyle to such a degree that all the memories converted
overtime to lyrics and rhythmic words.
In the poetry collection "Aegina Collectible Memorabilia" and The Benevolent Silence
Sevi has opened a new chapter in her poetry.
she hopes to share with her readers some of her deep thoughts,
experiences, and consciousness of a child
that still exists within her, trying to create a better world
then that she has experienced for more than half a century.