ELIZABETH GUDRAIS is associate editor at Harvard Magazine.

She was born in the 1970s in St. Louis Park, Minn. Not long after, she began a passionate love affair with the written word. Her voracious appetite for novels led her to read one a day during elementary-school summers. She completed her own first novel, a teen romance that has yet to be published, at age 10.

Elizabeth graduated from Apollo High School, a school with a satellite in its parking lot, in St. Cloud, Minn. She was a counselor at YMCA Camp Ihduhapi, in Loretto, Minn., during her formative years.

She also spent a lot of time with her grandmother, Monika Gudrais, who was born in Latvia and spoke five languages (Latvian, Russian, German, Polish, and English). Monika and her husband, Zigfrid, escaped Latvia with their young daughter in 1944 under threat of deportation to Siberia. They landed in Rochester, Minnesota, after a few years spent in refugee camps in Germany and Czechoslovakia (and with two more children in tow). Monika spent the next 40 years working as a translator at the Mayo Clinic; it was much more than a job to her, and somehow people from all over the world who had come to Rochester seeking medical care always ended up around Monika's dinner table.

Although Elizabeth didn't manage to pick up Russian, Romanian, Polish, or even Latvian during these years, this polyglot environment kindled her interest in other languages and cultures. She took French during high school, Russian in college, and has dabbled in Spanish, Arabic, Farsi, Latvian, Estonian, and Portuguese (a language she'll soon be learning much more of). She also treasures her membership in Servas, an international travel and homestay organization through which she has hosted visitors from England, France, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Hungary, and Canada, as well as the United States, and has traveled to Ireland, Wales, and England. Elizabeth spent time in Russia and Latvia during college. Other stamps in her passport include Portugal, Mexico, Canada, Jamaica, Chile, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland (and she is looking to add more).

Elizabeth inherited something from her other grandmother, too: Madeline was a journalist in Walnut Grove, Minn., onetime home of Laura Ingalls Wilder, and was also (and is still) a compulsive reader.

Elizabeth spent six years at daily newspapers, savoring both the government-watchdog and community-newspaper roles. At Harvard Magazine, she is proud to be a part of an enterprise that covers the university with editorial independence and brings alumni an objective account of events.

Now, to connect the dots... One evening at the University of Minnesota, Monika's son went out for pizza with friends and met Madeline's daughter, a sweet young farm girl. They were married in 1969.

Elizabeth's mother now lives in Duluth, Minn. Her father and stepmother run the Candlelight Inn, a Victorian bed & breakfast in Red Wing, Minn. Her stepmother, Lynette Gudrais, is a food columnist for the Red Wing Republican Eagle. One of her three stepbrothers, Jed Sanborn, is on the city council in Madison, Wis. If the other two ever get websites, she will promote them, too.

If you want to get Elizabeth talking, ask about Iyengar yoga, Nikolai Gogol, Julio Cortazar, bilingualism and identity, or the Latvian government's language policies.