Anna Caltabiano

Anna Caltabiano is a child of the transnational cyber punk era. She was born in British colonial Hong Kong and educated in Mandarin Chinese schools before moving to Palo Alto, California; the mecca of futurism. She lives down the street from Facebook in the town where its founders reside, along with the pioneers of Google and Apple.Caltabiano's high school classmates are themselves an eclectic mix; the lost offspring of ultra-wealthy Silicon Valley magnates, aspirational internet entrepreneurs and Stanford philosophy professors. Her writing reflects her concerns for her own generation as it seeks out salvation, meaning, and companionship in online communities, with pop culture as its shared language. Having grown up in privileged suburban America, Caltabiano has always felt bewildered by the intense personal pain of which her teenage peers would complain. To her, such anguish seemed like a betrayal of their good fortune. What exactly was driving these economically advantaged kids, lucky enough to be able to devote themselves entirely to self-fulfillment, to sabotage their lives? Anna Caltabiano's recent literary focus has been applied to the increasingly common practice of self-mutilation, which she sees as symbolizing a more universal urge among youth toward self destruction.