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Students in creative writing course discover their own amazing story, they are s
isters
Date
May 16, 2015 - 10:29AM
204 reading now
Corey Kilgannon
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Katy Olson, left, and Lizzie Valverde, biological sisters who were adopted by di
fferent families more than 30 years ago.
Katy Olson, left, and Lizzie Valverde, biological sisters who were adopted by di
fferent families more than 30 years ago. Photo: New York Times
New York: Lizzie Valverde and Katy Olson were strangers when they enrolled at Co
lumbia University a few years ago. Valverde is from New Jersey, while Olson had
grown up mostly in Florida and Iowa.
Their lives crossed in January 2013, on the first day of a writing class, when t
hey took part in one of those familiar around-the-table introductions that by th
e end had led them to a stunning realisation.
These strangers were sisters.
Olson, left, and Valverde on the Columbia campus.
Olson, left, and Valverde on the Columbia campus. Photo: New York Times
The two women had come to Columbia to learn the finer points of storytelling and
wound up in the middle of a doozy: an intertwined tale of their own that they s
ay they could never have conjured.
Their shared storyline - a chance reunion three decades after being born to the
same troubled mother in Florida and then raised by adoptive families in differen
t parts of the country - has been knitted together by years of curiosity on both
women's parts about their origins.
And when Valverde, 35, graduates on Monday with a bachelor's degree in creative
writing from the university's School of General Studies, Olson, 34, who graduate
d last year with a degree in creative writing and is now pursuing a master's deg
ree in the same subject at Columbia, will be there to congratulate her.
Lizzie Valverde as a child.
Lizzie Valverde as a child. Photo: The New York Times
So will their birth mother, Leslie Parker, 54, who had both girls when she was a
teenager in Tampa, Florida. It will be the first time she and Olson will speak.
Discussing their story publicly for the first time, the sisters described this w
eek how they both moved to New York City to pursue careers and decided at around
age 30 to study writing full time.
In the first of a series of coincidences that would bring them together, both ap
plied to, and were accepted at, the School of General Studies, which is unique a
mong Ivy League schools in offering returning students a full-fledged undergradu
ate college experience. Both registered for WRIT W3680, a literary-reporting cla
ss.
A childhood picture of Katy Olson.
A childhood picture of Katy Olson. Photo: The New York Times
Once there, they sat across from each other in a classroom in Kent Hall, where t
he instructor asked the students go around the table and introduce themselves.
Valverde, who had registered for the class just minutes before it began, introdu
ced herself and told the class, among other things, that she had been adopted as
a child and was raising a young daughter of her own. She also disclosed what sh

e described as her goofy obsession with the Olsen twins.

Olson was stupefied.
"It looked like she was having a panic attack," Valverde said.
Valverde's personal information matched closely what Olson had recently discover
ed about her own adoption and biological family. She realised that the classmate
across the table could be her biological sister.
"It fit together with lot of stuff that I knew," Olson said, including informati
on gleaned through online searches about her birth mother's identity as well as
hints that the woman had had an older daughter who seemed to be a student at Col
umbia.
Olson's attempts to contact that older daughter online had been unsuccessful, bu
t now she appeared to be here in the same classroom. "All the pieces just came t
ogether for me," recalled Olson, who nevertheless was hesitant.
"I worried that she'd think I was stalking her," she said. "But I didn't want to
let her get away. I couldn't go home and sit for a week without getting an answ
er to this question."
So she approached Valverde after class and began blurting out such detailed ques
tions about her personal life - about her maiden name, if she had been adopted i
n Florida and whether she lived in New Jersey - that Valverde, who never knew sh
e had a biological sister, was stunned.
"I think we're sisters," Olson recalled saying.
All Valverde could do was utter, "Is this real life?"
With that, two strangers were now family. They headed to a nearby bar and pepper
ed each other with get-to-know-each-other questions: Do you love Buffalo wings w
ith beer? Spicy food? Do you have weird pinkie toes? Do you love avocados?
On a more serious note, Valverde told Olson that she too knew about their mother
- in fact, she had met her.
Valverde explained that she had discovered Parker's maiden name under a whited-o
ut section of an adoption certificate, and had then conducted online searches th
at revealed Parker's criminal record, her police photo and the horrifying detail
s of a tortuous life that included being attacked by a well-known serial killer.
(The killer, Gary Ray Bowles, is on death row in Florida after confessing to th
e murders of six gay men.)
Valverde urged her sister to contact Parker, which Olson has done in online exch
anges, but not yet by phone.
In an interview on Thursday, Parker called the reconnection to her daughters an
answer to 30 years of prayers, adding, "I felt like the world was coming full-ci
rcle." In the years since putting the girls up for adoption, Parker raised three
sons while continuing to struggle through a meager existence.
She said she always wanted to be writer, but a hard-knock life riddled with pove
rty, drug abuse and emotional problems had been too much to overcome.
As a teenager, she let the girls go because, she said, "I was not in a position
to raise them," adding, "If I had raised them, they wouldn't have had the privil
eges they had," as adopted children.

"They're brilliant, beautiful young women," Parker said. "In them, I see what I
had the potential to be. They're both living what I always wanted to be."
The two sisters grew up very differently. Valverde enjoyed a comfortable life in
Bergen County in northern New Jersey, where her father was a television news ed
itor. Olson, who has mild cerebral palsy, spent much of her childhood coping wit
h physical challenges, including several medical procedures.
But from an early age, both were relentlessly curious, driven and passionate abo
ut writing, though they both also dropped out of high school and did not follow
the conventional college-to-career path.
Valverde did stints at two colleges and worked as a bartender and as a personal
assistant for a hip-hop artist. Olson grew up to become an actor and standup com
ic who performs regularly at clubs around New York City. Like Valverde, she came
to New York as a young woman.
It was their respective decisions to return to their first love and study writin
g that veered their lives toward each other. Since that first class, they have b
ecome close, meeting each other's adoptive families and spending holidays togeth
er.
Looking toward Monday, Valverde is helping with Parker's plans to travel to New
York for the "class day" graduation ceremony, all while reassuring her sister an
d Parker that the first-time meeting between the two women will go well.
For her part, Parker said that being reunited with her daughters had been inspir
ational and had moved her to start healing rifts with her own mother and sibling
s.
"I'm glad I chose to have them and gave them the chance at life," she said. "I'm
not religious, I'm spiritual, but if you don't believe in a higher power, you w
ould, when you heard their story."
New York Times
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