Columbia, nickname Coco, is a small-town girl from the mountains of Transylvania, where, she recalls, 'autumns were a splash of splendid color but winters were so cold and bare my memories of them are all in black and white.'
At a young age, she would steal her father's brushes and oils but couldn't advance much beyond painting her own face, hands and the back of the living-room sofa, so she turned to words instead, graduating in journalism and launching her own national newspaper in Bucharest, Romania, while still in her mid-20s. After 15 years in the media management field, Columbia moved to a rural, rustic region in the...more
