[The Stage is on Fire] is a page-turner in which, much like life, there are no easy answers and yet each step of the journey yields insight and hope. This work of heart must not be missed!
Melanie Faith
Creative Writing Teacher, Essayist & Poet.
Katie Steedly’s first-person piece [The Unspeakable Gift] is a riveting retelling of her participation in a National Institutes of Health study that aided her quest to come to grips with her life of living with a rare genetic disorder. Her writing is superb.
The Society of Professional Journalists
In recognition of receiving the Dateline Award for the Washingtonian Magazine essay, The Unspeakable Gift.
I thank you … It is the authenticity of your “class notes”; and it is the delicacy and skill with which you present the nuances of classroom life and the actuality of your students’ and fellow teachers’ lives.
Maxine Greene
Philosopher and Education Scholar
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a note on the body
but you live oh, you live
everyday you wake you raise the dead
everything you do is a miracle
From Danez Smith’s “a note on the body.”
Everything you do is a miracle. Let that sink in. Miracle is a word, right up there with sacred, that I struggle to wrap my arms around. I believe in miracles, but I am not sure why. I defend their existence vehemently in conversation with naysayers, as if their existence needs my defense. I can point to miracles — vaccines, birth, blossoms, tides — and not hesitate to call them miracles. Maybe its faith. (Faith is the cornerstone of all that is courageous and loving.) Maybe its wisdom. (We all are wise when we listen and pay attention.) Maybe its imagination. (Imagination is miraculous in and of itself.)
Our bodies are miracles. Energy born of potential and love. A mind able to solve, invent, and remember. Muscles able to knit, tap dance, and play a fiddle. Our bones giving shape to it all. Our capacity to heal. The body is miraculous.
The older I get, the more miraculous my body becomes.
About Katie
From Louisville. Live in Atlanta. Curious by nature. Researcher by education. Writer by practice. Grateful heart by desire.
Buy the Book!
The Stage Is On Fire, a memoir about hope and change, reasons for voyaging, and dreams burning down can be purchased on Amazon.
