MEET OUR GRADUATES: Cherissa Andrade

At age 15, she and her two younger brothers were forced to fend for themselves after the boyfriend of Andrade’s mother decided he didn’t want children. The children moved in with Andrade’s 18-year-old sister. Andrade missed a lot of school and worked at Papa Ginos to help pay expenses.

After high school, she enlisted in the army. Upon completing boot camp, and while on leave, Andrade became pregnant. In 2008, two weeks before her son’s first birthday, she was sent overseas to Kuwait and from there, to Iraq. In 2009 she was sent to Afghanistan and completed her tour of duty in 2010. She said, “When I saw my son again he didn’t know who I was. He was already walking and talking.”

Before Andrade entered the military, she said she had no ambition to go to college and placed no value on her own life. “It didn’t matter to me where I was going,” she said. “But the military matured me. I got a bigger picture of life. I started taking classes while I was overseas because I didn’t want my son to have the kind of life I had.” She also began writing her memoirs overseas.

Upon returning to the U.S., Andrade enrolled at RIC as an English/creative writing major. Recently she published a portion of her memoirs in Shoreline: Rhode Island College’s Magazine of Literature and Art in which she describes the deferred dreams of her parents which led to their broken home. She was also awarded the Jean Garrigue Award for Creative Writing.

Andrade intends to go on to graduate school to pursue a master’s degree in English with emphasis on creative nonfiction.