Sarah J. Swofford

The daughter of a pair of Methodist missionaries, Sarah Swofford grew up, from age three to eight, in Montevideo, Uruguay. "I was old enough to keep my Spanish," she notes. Back in the US, the family settled in the suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri. "After high school, I lived in Bolivia for a year," she says. "I volunteered with a women and children's social project in a rented garage. The director and I helped them find medical and legal resources. We helped with housing, clothing and food." She also met her Bolivian future husband Kialing Perez, at the time a med school student in La Paz. They got married two years later, in 2001, while she was studying international relations at American University in Washington, DC. During his two medical residencies, they spent three years in New York, where she worked on an HIV/AIDS project, and, after the birth of their son Sebastian in 2006, three years in Columbia, Missouri, where she earned a master's in public health. They arrived in Eugene in 2009, when he took a job with PeaceHealth Medical Group. A year later, she gave birth to second son Sam. "Then I wrote a book," says Swofford, who interviewed women from around the country by phone for her self-published 2014 volume, From Ouch! To Ahhh... The New Mom's Guide To Sex After Baby. "Now that has become the work I do. I write articles, give workshops, and do individual coaching." For the past year, she has also been working on a second book, a romance novel about a young American woman who travels to South America. Learn about books, workshops and coaching on her website: sarahjswofford.com.