The Morning Glory Project

There are certain groups to which nobody wants to belong. High among that list of undesirable memberships is to be one whose loved one has been stolen from you by gun violence. Sandy Phillips and her husband Lonnie are members of this loathsome club. Their daughter, Jessica Ghawi, was murdered in the massacre at the midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises in the Summer of 2012 in Aurora, Colorad...

Whether doing international reporting under the aegis of the United Nations on the effects of a drought in sub-Saharan Africa in 1984, or interviewing influencers as diverse as Oprah Winfrey and Maxine Waters, Audrey Edwards has had a 40-year career as a journalist with work that has won awards, been used in university courses, and referenced on national television talk shows. A former senior-leve...

Before turning to a life of crime (or at least writing fictional crime), Boston Globe-bestselling author and multiple Massachusetts Center for the Book honoree Clea Simon was a journalist. The author of three nonfiction books and 31 mysteries, most recently the amateur sleuth adventure Bad Boy Beat, her books alternate between cozies (usually featuring cats) and darker psychological thrillers and...

Caroline Leavitt’s mother told her that all the Leavitt women were cursed with tragic lives. And, at first it seemed true. Caroline’s young fiancé died in her arms from a heart attack two weeks before their wedding. She was in a coma and in the hospital for months with a mysterious critical illness no one thought she could survive. And her writing career shattered, making it seem that she would ne...

Alex Kuisis was a happily married early-childhood-educator-turned-health coach, living a beautifully fulfilling life in Denver, Colorado, when the doorbell rang on September 1, 2016. It was the police, there to arrest her for seven felony crimes that she did not commit. Truth Matters, Love Wins is both an astounding account of fighting false accusations in a slanted criminal justice system, and an...

Cara Brown is an award-winning watercolor artist and teacher, though she came about this having this be her life quite unexpectedly. When she was 24, her first husband proposed marriage to her – in front of a group of friends. She didn’t say yes or no, she said “I want kids.” She had always yearned for the whole experience available to people in female bodies – becoming a mother, including being p...

When Leah Lax was asked to write a libretto for an opera intended to celebrate local immigrants, she began by spending a year listening to the stories of upheaval, migration, and arrival, told to her in confidence by people from around the globe. She felt she had discovered the song of America, found its great beating heart. But Leah also discovered troubling truths about America, through the eyes...

Growing up as a girl in the 1950’s girls were not expected to have any career goals. They were going to be housewives. Susanna Solomon’s mother complained bitterly about her lot in life. Her father told her she was too stupid to go to college, then he fell in love with someone else—someone other than Susanna’s mother. When her mother took her own life when Susanna was fourteen, the upheaval in the...

Kathryn Abdul-Baki was born in Washington, DC, to an Arab father and an American mother. In addition to her bi-cultural immediate family, she had a globetrotting childhood, growing up with dramatic changes in community and culture as her father’s work brought them to Iran, Kuwait, Beirut, and Jerusalem. The geographical and cultural changes were huge, but dwarfed in comparison to the tragic losses...

Donna Stoneham and her mother found a special closeness in the end of Mary Ruth’s life. Theirs had been a relationship fraught with challenge throughout most of their shared lifetime but in her mother’s final years, the two found healing and deep connection. When Mary Ruth passed, Donna was launched into a new kind of transformational grief journey in which the conversation with her mother did not...

Jennifer Marshall experienced four psychiatric hospitalizations within five years—two before any diagnosis was reached, and two more because she was trying to protect her son during her own postpartum psychosis and later after going off medication to protect her unborn daughter. All of those hospitalizations were because she was unmedicated at the time. Then, seven years later, after seven and a h...

As a follow up to her memoir Poetic License which came out in 2020, Gretchen Cherington dug deeper into family myth and lore, resulting in her new memoir The Butcher, the Embezzler, and the Fall Guy—A Family Memoir of Scandal and Greed in the Meat Industry. In the early 1900s, Gretchen’s paternal grandfather was recruited by George A. Hormel to help him build what is now the multi-billion dollar f...

Nicki Traikos has been an artist at heart her entire life, though in her early career she thought she had to choose a more “practical and profitable” way to earn a living. But her creative self found its way into every job until eventually she decided she wanted to be a full-time artist, but not a starving artist. Today Nicki is the living embodiment of her company’s name: Life I Design. She has b...

Christy Warren is a retired fire captain/paramedic from the Berkeley, California Fire Department, with 25 years of service as a first responder. In 2014, she was diagnosed with PTSD and struggled through shame, exhaustion and feelings of suicide to finally ask for help so she could fight for her recovery. In her memoir, Flashpoint: A Firefighter’s Journey Through PTSD Christy reveals with both can...

Small in stature, large in presence, and always in charge, Joanne Greene anchored the news and hosted talk shows on San Francisco radio while totally devoted to her family—until a traumatic accident suddenly removed her ability to control anything. Her debut book, By Accident: A Memoir of Letting Go is a story of resilience and perseverance, of will and pluck, and of positivity and gratitude for l...

Margo Fowkes is the mother of two children – Jimmy, forever age 21, and his younger sister Molly, who is now 26. After Jimmy’s death in 2014, Margo created Salt Water, a blog and online community that provides a safe harbor for those who are grieving the death of someone dear to them. Margo is the president of OnTarget Consulting, a firm specializing in helping organizations and their leaders act...

Carlyn Montes de Oca grew up surrounded by secrets. She never knew that her dad was a Marin during World War II or that her grandmother hired kidnappers to bring her mother back home after her parents eloped. But her parents took an even bigger secret to their graves…Carlyn’s identity. At age 57, a DNA test taken for fun revealed that Carlyn’s parents were not her biological parents and everyone i...

For 21 days in 1976, Carol Menaker served with eleven others on a sequestered jury in the trial of Frederick Burton, a young Black Revolutionary charged with the grisly murders of two white prison wardens. She was 24 years old. Forty-seven years later, she is publishing a memoir in which she unravels the trauma of that experience and comes to the unsettling conclusion that her youth, naïveté, and...

For lots of us, there’s the life we plan and then there is reality. At age 22, looking forward to a life full of opportunity for success and happiness, Jennifer Cramer-Miller got tossed into a world she’d never imagined. Diagnosed with an incurable autoimmune disease that caused kidney failure, she would face dialysis, and ultimately not only one kidney transplant, but four…and counting. This led...

How will empathetic people survive the troubles of this time? How do we rescue our overburdened spirits from overlapping disasters such as rising fascism and climate collapse? And from where can we summon the power to heal ourselves, our communities, and the planet? These are the animating questions behind singer, songwriter, and storyteller Shannon Curtis’s newest album Good to Me—Curtis’s 10th s...

Arin Fugate is a survivor. From between the ages of 11-21, she was raised as a “resident” of a spiritual cult and deemed for a time the “ceremonial virgin” whose mother surrendered her child’s custody to the spiritual leader. Deprived of food, education, and freedom of thought, Arin was isolated from a world she’d been taught to fear and indoctrinated in the twisted spirituality of the leader. Ari...

Isidra Mencos was born and raised in Barcelona when her home country was under the oppressive rule of Franco and strict religious teachings. Isidra spent her twenties experimenting with the new freedoms afforded by the end of Franco’s dictatorship, causing her to have a double life of “good girl” and “rebel.” She immersed herself in books and dancing, and working at various jobs. In 1992 she moved...

It can be a helpless feeling to watch a loved one slipping away, becoming increasingly lost to mental illness, drug use, and even homelessness. In this very personal episode, the host of The Morning Glory Project welcomes a loved one, once thought lost. Using only a nickname to protect her privacy, Meesh, now stable, self-sufficient, and four years sober, shares her story of how the toxic cocktail...

With over 6 million books sold (and counting), Kathia’s novels have been #1 bestsellers around the world. They’ve received starred reviews, have consistently earned Editor’s Picks for Best Romance, and have been featured by O, The Oprah Magazine. Kathia has written over 40 books and counting, some translated into several languages, all about hope and dreams and the bonds of friendship and family....

In troubled times, what good is art of any kind, much less poetry? To many, poetry seems so much the purview of the elite, the dalliances of the fanciful. It can seem esoteric and out of reach for most. Kirsten Casey, both as a poet herself and in her work with teen writers, has found that poetry is far more than fancy, that it can be not only accessible, but essential, and that engaging young peo...