Barbara Drake-Vera is a writer, teacher, and the author of MELTED AWAY: A MEMOIR OF CLIMATE CHANGE & CAREGIVING IN PERU (LSU Press, 2024), winner of the silver Florida Book Award in general nonfiction and a finalist for the Sarton Women’s Book Award in memoir. Her essays and creative nonfiction have appeared in Terrain, Wild Roof Journal, North Dakota Quarterly, The Invading Sea, and elsewhere, with short fiction in New Delta Review, Red Rock Review, Iris: A Journal for Women, and various anthologies. Her work has been supported by a residency at the Key West Literary Seminar and an Individual Artist Fellowship in Fiction from the State of Florida.
A former reporter, Drake-Vera’s journalism credits include 500+ features, arts reviews, and op-eds in NBC.com, The Village Voice, Huffington Post, Miami Herald, Orlando Sentinel, Global Voices Online, and other national and regional news outlets. While living in Peru from 2007 to 2014, she worked as a field producer for NBC Nightly News, Dateline, and the TODAY Show, assisting with breaking news and environmental coverage.
In 2011, she brought her estranged father with Alzheimer’s to live with her in Lima, opening the door to personal and family healing, a process she describes in MELTED AWAY. Her unusual caregiving odyssey abroad has been showcased on HealthCentral.com, Minding Our Elders, and the AlzAuthors and Fading Memories podcasts. She continues her advocacy for caregivers and their loved ones as a member of AlzAuthors., a global community of 400+ authors whose works light the way for others impacted by dementia.
As an advocate for the environment, Drake-Vera leads workshops on processing climate emotions and participated in 2025’s We Are The Possible, an award-winning, interdisciplinary program that brings together 250 writers, artists, scientists and educators from around the world to co-create new climate narratives showing there is hope for a livable, fairer future if we act now. One of her climate stories inspired the poem “Last One Standing” in the We Are the Possible — Planet: 12 Poems for 12 Days of COP30 anthology, which debuted at the UN Climate Summit in Belem, Brazil, in November 2025.
Drake-Vera is featured in the Emmy-nominated documentary GOOD NATURED (2025, directed by Ash Stokes), which explores how Floridians are responding to climate change and rapid environmental upheaval.
Drake-Vera has taught fiction writing at the University of Florida and was the founder and facilitator of Telling Our Stories, a landmark memoir-writing workshop for emerging elderly writers on Miami Beach that took place on Miami Beach in the late 1990s, a period of rapid gentrification.
She has just completed a follow-up to MELTED AWAY that traces her search for a missing indigenous woman she befriended in the high Andes. She is now working on a novel.
She holds a bachelor’s degree in English from SUNY College at Purchase and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Florida.
