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Our mission
Text Power Telling (TPT) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization whose mission is to provide safe spaces for survivors of sexual trauma to practice writing as a transformative and healing process. Through writing workshops, online publications, and collaborations with diverse stakeholders (including therapists, community organizers, public service organizations), TPT centers sexual trauma survivors’ healing by providing opportunities for creative expression in writing, art, and body.
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A message from our founders
According to the National Sexual Resource Center, 81% of women and 43% of men report unwanted touching or sexual harassment, with one in three female victims and one in five male victims of experienced completed or attempted rape for the first time between the ages of 11 and 17.
We founded Text Power Telling to create a safe space for survivors to share, heal, and create through writing and creative arts. The survivor community we have built together allows us to lift each other up, empower each other in ways we did not think possible, and like a lotus flower break through the muck and blossom.
As survivors ourselves, we feel blessed to be able to draw strength, acceptance, and love from an international community of survivors. Thank you for supporting TPT and for believing in us. We promise to use your donation with love, compassion, and respect.
With gratitude,
Jackie & Jess
Why This Work Matters
About the artists
Brooke Bishop is an artist who lives in both Philadelphia and New York with her husband and their dog, Winston. Painting has long been her creative outlet and hobby, a way to express, reflect, and balance life.
Regan Caton is a collage artist bringing a nostalgic yet modern twist to wall art, creating one-of-a-kind pieces from vintage ephemera, recycled to-go cups, stamps, and advertising. Committed to giving new life to forgotten materials, her work tells stories of the past while adding character, history, and an eco-conscious mission to contemporary spaces. A former marketing director at a global online art gallery, she now applies her storytelling vision as the founder and curator of the upcoming Coffee Table Art Book, a hardcover collection celebrating coffee-inspired art from around the world.
Seeing the Road Ahead is part of my Frames of Mind series, which explores how perspective shapes our journey toward empowerment. The collage incorporates vintage postcards, maps, stamps, and clippings, fragments once used to carry voices across borders and share personal truths. At its center, retro glasses serve as a lens for envisioning possibility, resilience, and self-worth.
About the piece
This piece speaks to the mission of Text Power Telling by honoring the many ways stories travel and inspire change. The words and images layered into the collage,“your voice,” “discover,” “solid ground”—echo the strength that comes from reclaiming identity, knowing value, and seeing oneself as both seen and loved. It is a reminder that empowerment is not only about the past we carry, but also about charting a future with clarity, courage, and hope.
Ling Chen learned how to draw in her middle school drawing club in Qingdao, China. Most days after school, she spent an hour or two studying still life with a 2B pencil and eventually got really good at crosshatching. Her art training ended before she got into an academic high school and went on to get an engineering degree in China and an MBA in the U.S.
She started sketching Jersey City in the spring of 2018. Initially, she was just passing time while waiting in line at Wonder Bagel or having ice cream at Torico. The more she sketched, the more places she found interesting. Her casual doodling grew to an ambition to document her neighborhood as we know it today. After many years in Jersey City, I now live in Montclair, NJ with my family.
Austin-based artist Shannon De Leon, founder of Good Cheer Creative, creates paintings that celebrate resilience, gratitude, and the beauty of everyday life. A self-taught artist who began by painting banners for her children’s birthdays, Shannon found deeper purpose in her work after her daughter’s cancer recovery, using art as a way to process and restore. Her pieces reflect warmth, joy, and quiet strength, a reminder of the light that endures through challenge
About the piece
In many cultures, the plum blossom symbolizes resilience and a spirit that persists through hardship: beautiful, fragile, strong all at once.
New Jersey artist Michael Gabriele works in the medium of pastel on paper. Art on display at The Space for Text Power Telling are digital prints of JPGs from his original landscape and still life pastels.
A 1975 graduate of Montclair State University, Gabriele has been part of the northern New Jersey arts scene for 40 years. He’s a member of the executive board of Allied Artists of America, New York, which recently has held group exhibitions at the Salmagundi Club, New York; the Butler Art Institute, Youngstown, Ohio; and the Reading Museum, Reading, Pennsylvania.
His work has been showcased in numerous galleries and museums in New Jersey, including exhibitions at the Bluestone Coffee Company, Montclair, the Passaic County Arts Center in Hawthorne, the Glen Rock Public Library, the Clifton Arts Center, and Berkshire Hathaway Home Services art gallery in Montclair.
Previously, his landscape and still life pastels were selected five times for “Art Connections,” which was an annual juried exhibition (no longer active) at Montclair State’s George Segal Gallery.
During the month of November (2025), his artwork will be on display at Cedar Beans Coffee Joint, 575 Pompton Ave., Cedar Grove, NJ. The exhibit will open with a reception on Wednesday, Nov. 5, 6-8 p.m. Admission to the reception is free, and the public is cordially invited to attend.
Along with his artwork, Gabriele is an author of five books on New Jersey history, all published by The History Press.
Linda Heller graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in illustration. She has written and/or illustrated sixteen children's books; some won prizes and one is part of the third grade curriculum nationwide. She also writes short stories and makes ceramic sculptures and jewelry. Her story, “Carla Before and After,” is featured in Issue VI of Text Power Telling Magazine.
About the piece
This ceramic piece is made from brown clay and colored with underglazes. She made it to give herself a nurturing mother, and to understand how such a mother feels.
Brezaja Hutcheson is a visual artist working in painting, photography, and film. Their work involves themes of identity, transcendence, and exploration of the unknown. Brezaja's work has been presented at the LGBT Center in NYC and Beeler Gallery in Columbus, OH. They earned their BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2020.
@brezaja.monet on instagram
About the piece
Brezaja made this piece while thinking about how potent the idea of new life is, something that should be protected and honored. This can be viewed as a person's inner-child/innocence or just being protected from harm.
Rose Hyppolite is an auditor, but art has always been something she turns to in her personal life. She doesn’t create every day, but when she does, it is usually in moments when she needs to express something she cannot put into words. Her drawings emerge from what she feels in those moments, and that is where their honesty and strength come from. For her, art is a way of releasing emotion and finding resilience.
About the piece
This piece was drawn over two rainy nights, and that atmosphere shows through in the subject’s expression. There is sorrow in her eyes, but also a strength that does not break. The blue headwrap feels almost like a crown, giving her dignity and calm. The light around her is steady and unbroken, like something that cannot be put out. To Rose, she represents a mix of pain and resilience, a reminder of the way hope continues to shine even in heavy moments.
Samara is a self-taught artist who paints intuitively and often experiments with color and movement. Her approach is less planning, more expression.
About the piece
In the heart of the red and dark folds of memory,
There’s both destruction and rebirth—
I am here, I’m still becoming
Jan Kamper completed numerous art courses at Montclair State University prior to receiving her MSW at Rutgers University. Following that she had a long, fulfilling career as a social worker and has recently retired. She returned to working on her art, receiving 1st place & later 2nd place awards from the New Jersey Senior Citizens Art Show in 2021 and 2025.
About the piece
The original art work has been printed onto a canvas tote. Having owned cats her entire adult life, she finds them interesting to draw. In these works, she exaggerated their color and the backgrounds to further emphasize various moods.
Lindsay Liang is a multidisciplinary artist based in New York whose work explores trauma, gesture, and the psychological weight of everyday actions. Through painting, sculpture, and installation, she examines bodily fragmentation and the limits of visual language, often drawing from feminist theory and her own experiences across cultural spaces.
www.instagram.com/lindsayyliang/
About the piece
“The Reach” was created following the artist’s experience of sexual assault during her teenage years as a model. Unable to afford legal representation, she entered a prolonged state of psychological struggle — not only from the violation itself, but from the realization that justice was both financially and structurally out of reach.
The painting also reflects a broader, collective silence: many women around her had experienced similar harm, and even when their stories were known to one another, most chose to remain quiet. It was not denial, but exhaustion — a quiet surrender shaped by fear and helplessness.
In this context, “reaching” becomes a heavy and complicated act. The limbs in the painting extend across fractured space, not as a symbol of empowerment, but as a gesture that is tentative, difficult, and unresolved, one that speaks to the weight of survival in the absence of resolution.
Born in Brooklyn, NY and currently residing in Cedar Grove, NJ, Randall McMillan is an entertainment lawyer by trade but a lifelong artistic hobbyist. Essentially self-taught but for a watercolor painting course taken during his last semester of college at Cornell University, Randall works primarily with acrylics, inks, pastels and other mixed media. An aspiring full-time artist, he is presently working on what he hopes will be his debut collection of works for public exhibition.
About the piece
Acrylic, ink, pastel and gel medium on canvas. “Undeniably Present” is a reflection of three women who are showing up from their past traumas in a confident and resolute way, confident about the future that they will have from the lessons learned from the darkness of their pasts and embracing of the rejuvenating colors, patterns and diverse patchwork of the quilts that make up their lives. They are undeniably present and ready for their next chapters.
Olive Mickens, artist, teacher and mom, lived to the age of 93. Born in the Bronx in 1927, she attended the pioneering Traphagen School of Fashion and, following her aspirations to be a designer, took a job as a seamstress in the costume department of Radio City Music Hall. Olive raised five children, served as a Girl Scout leader and Cub Scout den mother always including art project badges. She channeled her artistic impulses into painting—in oil, watercolor, pastel and pencil—and was a founding member of the Clifton Artists Association in the early 1960s. She served as an officer and exhibition organizer, showing a painting for the last time in 2016.
Her work can be found in private collections throughout North America, and from Ireland to Japan. With her children grown, Olive had more time to study art at Yard School of Art, and to teach private classes. Her students included clergy, neighborhood children, and nursing home patients. Olive left some beautiful paintings, many of which showed her approach to positivity showing beautiful landscapes, flowers, children playing, and portraits.
About the piece
This pastel emphasizes the use of yellow for a bright look at life through these lovely flowers
Julia Nemeroff is a passionate painter and designer dedicated to transforming things and spaces into breathtaking experiences. With a love for color, texture, and form, my work seamlessly blends artistic expression with functional design, creating environments that are both visually stunning and deeply personal.
Over the past 20 years, I have explored various techniques, mediums and styles honing my skills as a painter featuring my work in galleries across Soho, NYC. My niche is abstract palette knife paintings that range from room accents to statement pieces.
About the piece
The journey to healing can feel fragmented, invisible even. The butterfly’s wings speak to this process: the once-hidden chrysalis cracked open, the soft new light emerging. This painting is an invitation to remember that your wings exist and to feel the support of the air you now inhabit.
Sherry Shahan creates art in a small California beach town. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize in Poetry and Short Fiction. Her collages have appeared in Front Porch Review, Hunger, Mud Season Review, Progenitor, Wisconsin Review, and elsewhere.
About the piece
Hear Me Sing is a mixed-media collage. I created the “canvas” from old envelopes. I then studded it with watermelon and pepper seeds and bits of sheet music. Two “eyes”' painted on an abstract landscape gaze out at at the world
This cut paper collage was created by making a canvas from red envelopes and embedding bits of sheet music.
A multimedia artist and creative based in the East Coast, Carol creates things that capture her interest and spreads joy. Believing in expressing herself freely, Carol works with different mediums and is always open to learning new methods and tools to expand her projects. When not creating, she can be found deep in a book or in the middle of a 90s romcom.
@connie.makesstuff on Instagram
About the piece
The piece is titled, Serenity. While the path to healing is not linear and is different between people, with time, there are moments of joy and peace that can be found. The woman in the painting is shown experiencing a moment of serenity and the elements around her showcase the passage of time. With this piece, I hope I can provide a moment of tranquility to those who view it.
Chynna Williams (she/her/hers) is an artist based in New Jersey whose work focuses on themes of mental health, reclaiming individuality, and self-acceptance. Using pen and paper, she captures the life of a black sheet ghost and of empowered divine bodies to show that in whatever form YOU want to present yourself, you are showing your FULL self. Art is meant for everyone. The only question she asks you to answer is, "How do I see myself when no one is looking?"
She enjoys exploring mental health, the aspects of ourselves that emerge when no one is looking, and the unveiling of self-identity. After all, we can all relate to sheet ghosts, and we all have our moments where we feel divine. Nearly all of my work is done in black and white, but if you take your time to sit with the art, Chynna is sure you will find it very colorful!