Brett Garcia Rose is a software entrepreneur, former animal rights investigator and activist, and fiction writer. His work has appeared in literary and consumer publications including Newsday Magazine, The Barcelona Review, Opium, Lit Up, Rose and Thorn, The Battered Suitcase, and many others.
His first novel, Noise, and his story collection, Losing Found Things, were published in 2014. He is at work on his second novel, Ren.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, he was in Battery Park, near his apartment, when the first plane hit. He ran toward the towers and joined the rescue effort, and he saw all of it: the jumpers, the chaos, everything. For weeks afterward he kept going back into the red zone on his motorcycle. He wrote about it, and about the kindness of strangers in those days, in the essay “Pura Vida”:
“I’ll never know why I ran towards the site… But in I ran.”
“There is nothing false about kindness. About generosity and sacrifice.”
A stutterer for most of his life, he has written about how it shaped the way he thinks: “We speak the way writers write, and we edit in real time.” Read “The Spoken World” and the Vagabond Press interview.