“I’m not scared, I’m excited,” says Brooke Lynn Halstead, having just unpacked her luggage. Besides the jet lag and the headache caused by her first encounter with Italian bureaucracy, she is ready to start her new adventure in Rome.
At only 20 years old, she left her home in the small town of Solon, New York, trading a quiet life surrounded by nature, friends and family to pursue a career in journalism. Upon her arrival, she met her two flatmates, one Polish and one Italian. “I was happy to find out that the international environment I was looking for was already in my house.”
That is also what she hopes to find at Luiss. Brooke is curious about the people around her. When someone speaks, she is in no hurry to respond; rather, she takes time to reflect on what she heard. For an attentive listener like her, being exposed to this multicultural environment is an opportunity to find new stories and perspectives: fertile ground for her writing.
She answers my questions with a constant smile on her face, showing an enthusiasm that only those who cross the ocean to chase their dreams seem to have.
For Brooke, these dreams have always been tied to art: a passion that started when she was only two, practising ballet, tap, modern and jazz. Through the elegance and expressiveness of dance, she found herself in a constant pursuit of beauty. Later, as soon as she started reading, literature came.
She has an instinctive relationship with books. “I choose genres depending on the ‘book mood’ I’m in. Recently, I’ve been interested in more of the American Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson.”
But Brooke also wants to see beauty and culture beyond the pages of books. She aims to enrich her knowledge through traveling and seeing in the world what she once could only imagine through art.
Besides, there is no doubt that traveling runs through her veins. “My mother is a flight attendant, so I’ve been encouraged to travel from a young age.” Brooke took that precious piece of advice and definitely embraced it. Before moving to Rome, she walked the Portuguese way of the Camino de Santiago. Staying still is not in her vocabulary.
This is not the first time Brooke has lived in Europe. When she was in college, she decided to spend a semester in Ireland. There, she found fertile ground for her passions and discovered new ones. While continuing her studies in arts and literature, she met a group of fellow cinema enthusiasts. While others went clubbing and hit the local discos, Brooke attended all the independent film festivals in town, continuously searching for the rarest cinematic treats.
In Rome, Brooke is searching for that same spark of beauty and art she found in Ireland, a pursuit that shapes her life and her writing. When writing, she finds her dimension: a blank page where she can meditate, think critically, and think through every aspect of the issue she is covering.
When AI is mentioned, Brooke shakes her head in disapproval. “To be clear, I think it could be a good tool. Problems arise when it is used to replace human creativity”. She is not worried about technology itself, but about “the risks of misinformation and loss of quality that come from its misuse”. Her writing reflects these concerns: she avoids using AI unless strictly necessary and proudly describes her work as completely “human-made”. Her motto? Quality over quantity.
Like many 20-year-olds, Brooke is uncertain about where life will take her. This is what excites her. While she unpacks her luggage, she feels ready to fill her adventure with experiences, ideas, encounters, and stories.
