We were lucky to catch up with Alex Poppe recently and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Alex , really happy you were able to join us today and we’re looking forward to sharing your story and insights with our readers. Let’s start with the heart of it all – purpose. How did you find your purpose?
What makes me get out of bed every day is this: Theoretically, we all have the right to the same rights. But in practice, we don’t. My only possession I will own throughout the entirety of my life is my body, yet I lack agency over it. I cannot decide who gets to touch it, when and how. I cannot decide what is best for my own reproductive health. This lack of agency negates my full personhood. July 24 marks two years since we’ve lost a significant part of that agency. Our November election outcomes could further chip away at it.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
I recently became the strategic communications advisor for Democracy Delivers, a USAID initiative that surges support, resources, and attention to countries experiencing promising windows of democratic opportunity. I marvel that I hold this position because I didn’t come up through the State Department or USAID; I don’t have a master’s degree in international relations; nor have I worked in the foreign service. I am a business analyst turned actor, turned educator/humanitarian aid volunteer, and writer. I have always been an avid reader, and the power of stories has directed my life’s path.
In the early aughts, I acted in a short film by writer/director Larysa Kondracki. She asked me to read her new screenplay which would become her debut feature, The Whistleblower, starring Rachel Weisz and Vanessa Redgrave. The main character is real life Kathryn Bolkovac, a UN peacekeeper in post-war Bosnia. She outed UN officials for their role in facilitating and then covering up sex trafficking. I devoured Larysa’s source material and continued down a literary rabbit hole, reading books by New York Times journalists and international aid workers.
Meeting journalist Jere Van Dyk, who had been kidnapped by the Taliban and held for 45 days, was another pivot point on my journey. I had just started taking creative writing classes at the Writers Studio (where I learned everything I know about the craft of writing). Jere encouraged me to go to Iraq for a teaching position, which turned out to be one of the best decisions I have ever made personally and professionally. My next book, Breakfast Wine: A Memoir of Chasing an Unconventional Life and Finding a Way Home, chronicles my eight years in northern Iraq and will be published by Apprentice House Press in May 2025.
My first four books are literary fiction, themed around badass women overcoming adversity in the aftermath of violence. Many of the characters struggle with issues of loss and identity. I am fascinated by who we become after life sucker punches us, how we navigate and find beauty in the ugly of living. I craft from research: much of what my characters experience has happened to real life people. I contributed an essay to Theatre Responds to Social Trauma: Chasing the Demons, edited by Ellen Kaplan and published by Routledge describing my fact-to-fiction process. This skill enabled me to transition from education to the humanitarian aid sector. I became a staff writer and then content manager for a small humanitarian aid organization, which was then acquired by Search for Common Ground, the largest dedicated peacebuilding organization in the world. Search for Common Ground is a frequent implementing partner of USAID.
I have lived and worked in Iraq, the West Bank, Ukraine, Poland, Turkey, Germany, and Panama. Being an actor sharpened my emotional intelligence, intrinsic to building relationships, and taught me how to craft an emotional connection to my material, which drives the mood of my writing. Being an educator showed me how to meet people where they are, understand their challenges, and help them solve them. Problem solving is essential to crafting narratives as it is to my role as strategic communications advisor. If I had not had any of these prior experiences, I would not hold my current role at USAID. My journey reflects some great advice Jere Van Dyk gave me in 2011: “Live your dreams, and then write about it.”
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
I can’t remember from where the following line came, but I love it, and it’s appropriate for our context: “Now is the time for guts and guile.” To quit the corporate world, giving up financial security, health insurance, and convention to pursue a variegated, visceral artist’s existence, where all the colors ran, took bold faith. I was approaching 30, an age deemed to old to “make it” as a female actor, let alone begin, when I was accepted into Circle in the Square’s two-year professional actor training program. I’m a much better writer than I am an actor, but my writing process is grounded in my actor training, and I wouldn’t be the writer I am had I not been an actor for over a decade. Having the guts to follow your gut, those choices that look illogical on paper but feel right, has been essential to my journey.
I joke that curiosity and desperation in equal measure drove my decision to accept a teaching position in northern Iraqi. Reading a job advertisement for an elite international school in Kurdistan conjured the petal-soft notes of the oud, the pungent smell of sun-roasted desert sand, and the lambent glow of bustling streets teeming with errands of mystery. Naïve and fueled by the myth of intuition, I balanced on the edge of my courage and applied. In a pre-ISIS world, my accepting a teaching position in Kurdistan was to swing on a rope of convention and let go.
Taking that teaching position was another pivotal moment. I could afford to keep taking writing classes at the Writers Studio (They offered online classes pre-COVID.) while saving enough money for grad school. Being in Iraq fueled my creativity, and I started getting published. After I earned my master’s, I was able to teach at a university in Iraq, from where I had opportunities to present at conferences in Baghdad and Cairo, and train teachers for Baghdad’s Ministry of Higher Education and for the State Department in Panama. My writing skills and experiences working in conflict and post-conflict zones were essential to my transitioning out of education and into humanitarian aid full time. My curiosity was stronger than the limitations others put on me or that I put on myself. Let your curiosity and passions drive your direction.
I studied with acting coach Tim Phillips, who taught students how to read like writers and mine a text. He always asked us to consider, “Why this? Why now?” Why is someone telling me this bit of information now? How do they want me to perceive them? What are they not saying? This ability to think critically, to take in information, decide what is true and what is bs, and to logically defend a point of view in speaking and writing is an essential life skill. I problem solve constantly in my strategic communications advisory role at USAID, which is a new role in the initiative, so there is no blue print for how to do it. Much like crafting narratives, I have to figure things out as I go. Problem solving is bedrocked in critical thinking and creativity. Develop both.
My advice is to ask for help. Women are not always encouraged to advocate for themselves, but I have had great success when I ask for help. Writers I know only through LinkedIn have answered questions, given advice, and written me book blurbs. Don’t be afraid to ask for what you need.
Thanks so much for sharing all these insights with us today. Before we go, is there a book that’s played in important role in your development?
Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures: A True Story from Hell on Earth by Kenneth Cain, Heidi Postlewait, and Andrew Thomson changed the direction of my life. In the book, Andrew, Ken, and Heidi detail their work for the UN on the frontlines of Cambodia, Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Liberia. The authors’ deployments were everything I craved: escape from the doldrums of ordinary living into adrenaline-fueled moments of feeling intensely alive. They did important work, partied like they meant it, and formed brothers-in-arms type friendships.
I first read Emergency Sex as I was becoming disillusioned with acting. Pursuing the chance to play someone else’s life seemed frivolous and indulgent, especially when I realized I wasn’t living my own. I was auditioning, occasionally performing, shopping for magic-making dresses, and waiting tables at an upscale tapas bar. I wasn’t challenging my personal limitations by having new experiences.
In 2005, through an aspiring playwright whose fiancée was best friends with the fiancée of the press secretary to then Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, I met Andrew Thomson, one of the Emergency Sex authors. One minute, the press secretary was offering me the chance to meet Andrew, and the next, Andrew and I were sitting in fellow Emergency Sex author Kenneth Cain’s apartment, drinking beer as Andrew told me stories from the book, first-hand. When Andrew excused himself, I got up to peruse the titles on Ken’s bookshelf, where several personal photos reproduced in Emergency Sex were displayed. Standing in front of the real-life objects photographed in my favorite book was an Alice Through the Looking Glass moment which made the fantastical looking glass world of humanitarian aid real. Metaphorically, I had climbed onto the fireplace mantle at Looking Glass House and was poking the mirror behind it. That night propelled me to step through the mirror and enter an alternate world. I certified to teach EFL and went abroad, gaining field experience and volunteering in the humanitarian aid sector. I never looked back.
The book didn’t impart nuggets of wisdom as much as it showed me possibilities and people who looked like me making those possibilities their realities. That’s one reason why representation in storytelling is paramount, especially in telling the stories of violent conflict. To know what war is really like, ask the women and children who suffer the brunt of it for their stories. You get a very different picture than the one portrayed in mainstream media.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.alexpoppe.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alex_poppe_author/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alex.poppe.16/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sallyalexpoppe/
Image Credits
Photo of me on the rooftop: Eric James Stephens
Photo of me in front of the water truck: Harold David Brito Ortega
Photo of me reading from Duende: Sonia Zacharias John
Both book cover photos: Alex Poppe
Photo of me on a panel: Josh Ogden-Davis
so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.
