Tag Archives: Mental Health Awareness

Shattering Stigmas is BACK. 2021 has been a trying year and it’s been my goal to bring Shattering Stigmas back in some form throughout the year instead of keeping it as a two week event that only happens once a year in October. I hope to use this space on my website as a place to host bloggers, friends and authors to talk about mental health openly, discuss craft with other writers and push the conversation past awareness into conversations around advocacy and accessibility. We’re kicking off this expanded version of Shattering Stigmas with an interview with my friend and middle grade extraordinaire, Nicole Melleby.

It’s been a wonderful two weeks of posts for Shattering Stigmas 2020. I’m so thrilled to welcome our last guest poster to close out the event. Rosiee Thor is the author of Tarnished Are the Stars and the forthcoming Fire Becomes Her (out from Scholastic 2022). You can find her online on Twitter and her website.

As we near the end of the official run of Shattering Stigmas 2020, I’m hoping the last few posts will help give you, the readers, some practical and emotional tools to tackle the rest of 2020 and beyond. Struggling sucks and it’s hard, but I marvel at how people, myself included, can use their resilience and strength to pave new paths forward together, yet apart. Today I’m so excited to bring Rebecca Mahoney, author of The Valley and the Flood (out February 23, 2021) to the blog with a post about the organizational systems that she used during a rough time in her life that later became handy when the pandemic hit this year. You can find Rebecca online on Twitter and her website. She also co-hosts The Bridge podcast.

If you haven’t seen Lili’s bookish make-up looks, you are missing out. I’m so excited to welcome her to Shattering Stigmas to discuss how her make-up looks helped her mental health this year. It’s such a helpful reminder that self love and self care can come in the most unexpected of places sometimes. You can find Lili online on Twitter and her blog. She is also the co-host of the Backlist Bookworms, an online book club of backlist books.

It’s been a wonderful two weeks of posts for Shattering Stigmas 2020. I’m so thrilled to welcome our last guest poster to close out the event. Rosiee Thor is the author of Tarnished Are the Stars and the forthcoming Fire Becomes Her (out from Scholastic 2022). You can find her online on Twitter and her website.

Troix is another one of my posters this year who has consistently come back and wrote incredible posts for Shattering Stigmas, and for that I am so thankful. I love this powerful post that Troix has written for this year’s event and am so honored to be able to share it here. You can find Troix online on Twitter or her website.

It warms my heart when incredible writers get the recognition and love their books deserve, and it has been amazing to see A Cuban Girl’s Guide to Tea and Tomorrow get selected as a Reese’s Book Club pick and hit the New York Times Bestseller list. I am so excited to welcome Laura Taylor Namey,Continue reading “Q&A with Laura Taylor Namey, Author of “A Cuban Girl’s Guide to Tea and Tomorrow” and “The Library of Lost Things””

2020 has been a year of grief for nearly all of us. Those of us grieving the lives we once had, those of us grieving the loss of loved ones from COVID-19 and those of us grieving or tending to those who are seriously sick, although not from COVID-19, in a year that makes everything more difficult. Today I’m welcoming Shae Carys to Shattering Stigmas with a beautiful post about grief and loss, disability and learning to fight for yourself in a year that has taken so much. Shae is a writer whose debut piece of fiction came out this year in the young adult anthology Rural Voices:15 Authors Challenge Assumptions About Small-Town America. You can find her online on Twitter.

One of my favorite parts of Shattering Stigmas is having the opportunity and honor to talk to authors about the craft of mental health representation as well as their own advocacy efforts to break down the stigma around mental illness. Today, I’m so excited to welcome Rocky Callen, author of A Breath Too Late, today to Shattering Stigmas to talk about her writing and mental health advocacy. You can find Rocky online on Twitter and find more A Breath Too Late content in her Linktree.

Today I’m so excited to welcome someone who loves books and musical theatre as much as I do to talk about how musical theatre can be such a powerful tool, like books, to bring people together over issues that might be difficult to talk to. Paola Guerrero is such a powerhouse within the online book community. She is an editorial intern with Entangled Publishing, singlehandedly organized Latinx Heritage Month Book Fest this year, runs the Accidentally in Love Book Club and works with Caffeine Book Tours. She also has a Book Tube where she discusses books and musicals. You can find Paola across the Internet at her Linktree.