Fall for the Book presents On Writing Trauma: Gender-Bending with Nikki Grimes, Grace Talusan, Sonja Solter, and Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn

With a steady rise of mental health awareness today, how do authors go about expressing pain and suffering through their writing? Moderator Jeannie Vanasco, author of the memoir Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was A Girl, leads a conversation with four authors about how they approached writing about trauma in their genre-bending books: Nikki Grimes and her YA memoir in verse, Ordinary Hazards; Grace Talusan and her memoir The Body Papers, which uses medical records, government documents and more; Sonja Solter with her middle grade novel-in-verse, When You Know What I Know; and Alysia Lin Ying Sawchyn with A Fish Growing Lungs, a collection of linked essays that reflect on her misdiagnosis and her ultimate recovery.