n her new essay collection, “Desire Lines,” author and journalist Kristen Millares Young, ’12, takes on the challenge of writing a memoir to uncover her matrilineal history while searching to recover the divine feminine throughout time. An award-winning journalist who has covered global stories for Washington Post and The Guardian, as well as business and politics for The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Millares Young’s newsroom training taught her to harden her affect. But in this debut memoir, she opens herself up toward emotional freedom.
“In horror at the regression of human rights for women in my birth country … to orient myself toward liberation, I set out to excavate womanhood, the body and the sacred,” Millares Young writes in the opening pages of “Desire Lines.” The collection explores the author’s experiences while reporting and conducting research on sex workers in Cuba and traveling throughout Europe in search of images of Cybele, a Roman goddess worshipped for having given life to gods, humans and animals.