[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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Wide-Awakeness
Why Here and Why Now?
I weep right now. Rather than simply weep and watch and burn, I write. I write to pay attention. I write about the beauty I find — wherever I see it — in my urgent hope to magnify, amplify, hold close, and lift up what can be missed if we turn away. I write about a reality that imagines big love and makes it so. I write to create, invite, and build.
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About Wide-Awakeness
Wide-awakeness is not my idea. Philosophers, scholars, and artists have been exploring it for generations. I was so hungry to understand, it I focused on it during my Ph.D. and founded this project. Wide-awakeness happens in the middle of the aesthetic, spiritual, emotional, in and of experience. It is where paying attention meets experience.
The work of Maxine Greene introduced me to wide-awakeness. Drawing from philosophers like Schütz, Merleau-Ponty, Dewey, and others, Green asserts that imagination makes empathy possible. In that frame, wide-awakeness defines our life project, builds our imagination, and shapes a world where ideas grow, interpretations and analyses flow, and creativity thrives. Wide-Awakeness is about world-building. I have dedicated more than twenty years of my life to exploring wide-awakeness. We must intentionally create pathways for wide-awakeness — spaces of imagination and empathy — in our world. That is the point of the Wide-Awakeness Project.
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.
