Franky Benítez

I was born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico and moved to the South Bronx at the age of almost-six. I am from a family of nine and nobody speaks to anyone else in my family very often, which is a long story that doesn’t matter.
The move from Puerto Rico to NYC meant that as a family, we were thrown into an environment in which shootings, drug addicts and constant chaos was the norm. I immersed myself in reading and writing at a young age, which allowed me to receive an excellent liberal arts education, and the skills necessary to be accepted into specialized high schools — but I hated high school.
I have studied yoga, meditation, nutrition, Western Herbal Medicine, the Fundamentals of Traditional Chinese Medicine, French, and received a BA in Comparative Literature.
I love to read and learn new skills. Sometimes, people say they don’t use their degree and I always think that is an incredibly ignorant statement; it is like saying “I never use my brain.”
I use all I have learned from relatives, books, classes, films, life experiences and music everyday.
There is no better mix then a little autodidacticism and formal education; this concoction created an extraordinarily well-organized circuitry that allows me to gain new skills quickly, and to assess and understand new situations well enough to ask questions . . . so much of life is rooted in asking questions.