Since I was 13, poems have been a way to make it through hard items, emotional pain, and confusion. Writing poetry has been so much part of my survival that it didn't occur to me that I could share my writing with others. Perhaps being a poet never felt like a valid option, or maybe I wasn’t ready to accept that I didn’t have to do just one thing. Sharing my thoughts, feelings, and experiences felt frivolous and even dangerous.

I stopped writing poems regularly and moved on to other things, until my life began to unravel. In 2014, during my first year of sobriety, 2 weeks before I defended my master’s thesis, I lost my baby at 5 months pregnant, and then moved to Oakland, California two months later. My relationship ended and I gripped to building a career in education, while trying to get through my grief alone. Eventually my career fell apart too, and what I had left was my creativity. The poems returned. Writing became medicine. It made my experience bearable—something I could look at on the page and make sense of, face, and begin to heal.

The poems in Traveling through Shadow, Coming into Light chronicle a liminal initiation—a time alone in a new place, facing myself, trying to stay sober, uncovering layer upon layer of trauma from childhood, tumultuous teen years, and the loss of my baby. As I accepted the reality that the life I’d built wasn’t working and needed to be torn down and rebuilt, poetry reflected back to me that there was something inside worth reaching toward.