The Pen Behind the Pages

Adelphina is the pen name of Dora Sanchez, a poet born and raised in Fredericksburg, Texas, whose voice carries both the grit of her upbringing and the wonder of a lifelong dreamer. Writing under her middle name — itself a tribute to her grandmother Delphina — Adelphina began sharing poetry in her late forties, discovering a form that could hold everything she had been quietly carrying for years. Her poetry defies easy categorization. She calls it a kaleidoscope: part realism, part imagination, always with an edge. A visual poet at heart, Adelphina aims to paint the mind with words — drawing readers through landscapes of survival, resilience, and guarded beauty. Her work spans from the hauntingly lyrical (Murder of Crows, In The Grey) to the darkly fantastical (Cinder Block Castle, My Grimoire Memoire), but a sliver of light always remains. There has to be balance, she says. Adelphina is largely self-taught, having grown her craft within the online poetry community Deep Underground Poetry, where she spent years studying the work of poets she admired — learning pacing, line breaks, and emotional depth through close reading and practice. In September 2023, she was honored with Poem of the Month for Stiletto Meadow, and her poem Not Like The Roses has been selected for inclusion in an upcoming anthology drawn from the site’s archives. Raised in a Hispanic household where tough love and resilience were the mother tongue, Adelphina brings a layered cultural perspective to her writing. Her voice is distinctly her own — hard-won, unhurried, and unapologetically personal. No one can write these words but me, she says. Having ownership of my voice is empowering. Her creative process is as intuitive as her poems. She writes late at night, earbuds in, music feeding her images and emotions, a spiral notebook beside the bed to catch what arrives before it disappears. She doesn’t write right away — she lets it build until it’s ready to overflow. Adelphina is currently at work on her first poetry collection and is expanding an early screenplay into a novel — the first in a planned trilogy featuring a Hispanic hero. She is also a digital artist, and her imagination moves freely between poetry, visual art, and the vivid worlds of Japanese anime. She lives in Fredericksburg, Texas, where she was born, and where she continues to write, dream, and find the words that hold someone’s hand when nothing else can.