Roxanna Gumiela In her retirement, Roxanna Gumiela is a trauma informed yoga instructor and writer. She is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and writes about her journey to wellness, which incorporates yoga and mental health therapy. Roxanna has had works of creative nonfiction and poetry published in We’ve Got Some Things to Say (2024), and Making Space for the Light (2026). The Light in Me The first thing I noticed as I stepped through the inner door of the hot yoga

Christelle Potgieter Christelle is a Namibia-based writer currently working on a memoir about trauma, addiction, and recovery titled, Fear. Her writing explores mental health, resilience, and the strength women find in reclaiming their lives after hardship. People often ask when my mental illness started. I never know how to answer that question. Did it begin when I was a child living in a home where safety did not exist? When I learned too early that the people meant to prot

Fred held my face in his hands, pulled me toward him, and kissed me. His tall body bent awkwardly over mine, swallowing me until I vanished. We had been on our way home from the amusement park when he had pulled into an apartment complex near the Tappan Zee Bridge. He parked in the lot and then took me by the hand across the complex’s grass lawn that reached into the Hudson River. We were standing on the corner of the lawn, looking at the Tappan Zee Bridge and the moon high

It was my last year as a teenager, three months into being 19. On this gloomy Thursday afternoon in October, I wanted to change my hair. I drove from the city to the suburbs to have lunch with my mom and check out this new hair salon. “It recently opened down the street and has cheap prices. Just try it out. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to go again,” she said as she dropped me off. I walked in and a middle-aged man with classic dark features greeted me. My mom left

by Sophia Shiroff In history class, we were given an assignment with gingerbread people outlined on paper and I immediately was brought back to sitting in my forensic interview. I have PTSD and a lot of my memories come back at random times, so I felt like poetry was the best way to be able to express a little bit of what that's like in my brain, as the past and present collide. As a survivor, there are so many feelings, emotions, and experiences that I find hard to express o

I’ve finally put it all together. He was a monster, a monster in dad’s clothing, but still a monster.

by Sherry Shahan Sherry Shahan a white settler artist, writer, and poet. She lives and works on unceded Chumash and Salinan land on the Central Coast of California. She has spent years wandering the globe as a journalist, quietly watching the world and its people from behind, whether in the jungles of Columbia, a backstreet in Havana, or alone from a window in a squat hotel room in Paris; whether with a 35 mm camera or an iPhone. Her sensibilities spill into two categories: T