Every Tuesday this month, I’ll post a link to one of my articles along with the backstory about how the piece came to be.

One evening in 2006, I covered a community board meeting in Brooklyn as part of my graduate school work. Toward the end of the meeting, residents of Sunset Park were invited to share their concerns in the public forum. One woman, a nurse at a local hospital, mentioned a recent uptick in young Latinas seeking treatment for suicide attempts.

As a Latina myself (my father was born in Cuba), this piqued my interest, so I set out to learn more. I combed government data to find that this wasn’t an isolated issue. Young Latinas, it turned out, attempted suicide more than any other ethnic group. I wrote an article about this phenomenon for a graduate school assignment, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that the issue deserved a much wider audience.

When I became a full-time freelancer in 2009, one of my earliest goals was to land a story in a national newsstand magazine. I set my sights on Latina — the perfect outlet for a follow-up on the Latina suicide attempt issue. I re-interviewed a key source (the doctor researching this epidemic) and sent my pitch.

It took about a year from pitch to publication, but “Sound the Alarm” remains one of my proudest achievements.

Image by a.love photography