Barbara Drake-Vera

Born in New York City and raised in New Jersey and Massachusetts, Barbara Drake-Vera lives in Gainesville, Florida, with her husband, photographer Jorge Vera Du Bois.

Barbara is an award-winning fiction writer and journalist with credits in the Miami Herald, MSNBC, Village Voice, Huffington Post, Miami New Times, North Dakota Quarterly, Red Rock Review, Portland Review, New Delta Review and Iris: A Journal for Women. Her honors include a Fellowship in Fiction from the State of Florida and a fiction grant from the Miami-Dade Cultural Affairs Council. While living in Peru from 2007 to 2014, she worked as a freelance reporter and as a field producer for NBC Nightly News and the TODAY Show, assisting with coverage of environmental news and the hunt for Dutch murderer Joran van der Sloot.

There she also ran the blog An American in Lima (cited as an insider’s travel resource by National Geographic Traveler) and cofounded with Jorge the nonprofit Clima y Cultura (Climate and Culture), an NGO that raised awareness of the impacts of climate change on indigenous cultures, particularly in the high Andes.

Barbara’s debut book, Melted Away: A Memoir of Climate Change & Caregiving in Peru (LSU Press, Mar. 2024), chronicles the transformation she underwent caring for her long-estranged father with Alzheimer’s in “the land of the Incas,” as he referred to his new home. When she, Jorge and their son, Sam, returned to the United States in 2014, Barbara served as a volunteer ambassador for the Alzheimer’s Association, representing Florida District 3 as an advocate for family caregivers and their loved ones with dementia.

Her unusual eldercare journey has been featured on Health Central, Minding Our Elders and on the Fading Memories podcast.

She holds a bachelor’s degree in English from SUNY Purchase and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Florida, where she studied with novelists Jill Ciment and David Leavitt.

For most of her life, she wrote as Barbara Drake. Since 2022, she has used the name Barbara Drake-Vera, a nod to her dual identity straddling North and South American cultures.