Holly Rizzuto Palker and Amanda Fields chat with Dr. Robyn Kozlowitz, author of Post Traumatic Parenting, about using guilt as a teacher, discovering how stress and trauma affect parenting, and creating patterns of joy. Dr. Kozlowitz argues that the best time to rewire our trauma brain is when we are parenting. It gives us an opportunity to heal our inner child through admitting our own damage and not passing it onto our children. By recognizing our trauma, we take the shame away.

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz is a clinical child psychologist and the author of the recently released book Post-Traumatic Parenting: Break the Cycle, Become the Parent You Always Wanted to Be. She’s a leading expert on the intersection of trauma and parenting, helping parents understand how both early life experiences and more recent events can shape—and sometimes sabotage—their ability to respond to their children with calm, clarity, and connection.

Her core belief is simple but powerful: Parenting is a skill—and everyone can learn it. If you’re struggling, it’s not because you’re broken. It’s often because trauma has blocked your access to the parenting tools you need. And not only can you learn to parent skillfully after trauma—you can actually heal in the process.

Through her book, podcast, YouTube channel, and the Post-Traumatic Parenting Summit, Dr. K offers practical tools, clinical insight, and deep compassion to help parents move from reactivity to intention.

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Holly Rizzuto Palker and Eva Langston chat with Michelle Lerner, author of Ring, about defining and treating complicated grief, living with irreparable damage, and finding healing in nature. Ring takes the reader on an unforgettable odyssey through the depths of human emotion, from the hollows of grief to the heights of newfound hope. In the backdrop of a snow-covered sanctuary designed to aid the dying, Lee, a middle-aged non-binary person from the Midwest, grapples with the unbearable weight of losing their young adult daughter. Abandoning their previous life and even the comfort of a longtime spouse, Lee is driven by a quest for closure—or an end to it all.

Michelle Lerner is the author of the novel Ring, published by Bancroft Press, the poetry chapbook Protection, published by Poetry Box and she has had personal essays in publications like Time and The Hill; She’s published poems and other writing in journals such as Shenandoah and VQR. She has an MFA in Poetry from The New School and a law degree from Harvard Law School. Michelle directs the Laura Boss Poetry Foundation and mentors young writers in Gaza through the organization We are Not Numbers. She’s a recovering public interest lawyer currently emerging from late-stage neurological Lyme Disease, living with her family in rural New Jersey.

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Amanda Fields and Holly Rizzuto Palker chat with Claire Adam, author of Love Forms, about forced delivery in Venezuela and testing the mother-child bond in fiction.

Love Forms, longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, centers on Dawn, a 58 year old mother of two grown sons. She finds herself returning to her past and a secret she has kept for many years. When Dawn was 16, her parents sent her from Trinidad to Venezuela to have a baby and give her up for adoption. She’s now trying to track down the daughter she gave up, which leads her to retrace her journey from Trinidad to Venezuela to London, and question not only that fateful decision she made as a teenager but every turn in the road of her life since.

Claire Adam’s debut novel, Golden Child, was listed as one of the BBC’s “100 Novels That Shaped Our World” and was awarded the Desmond Elliott Prize, the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, the McKitterick Prize, and the Barnes & Noble Discover Award. She was born and raised in Trinidad. She studied physics at Brown University and later received an MA in creative writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. She lives in London.

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Amanda Fields and Holly Rizzuto Palker chat with Teri Vlassopoulos, author of Living Expenses, about technology creep in modern relationships, fertility treatments’ effect on emotional intimacy, and bookstore karaoke. Teri’s most recent novel interrogates the strain that can accompany even the strongest of relationships and also the discovery that so often it is when we are on the way to something else and stuck in the in-between period that we discover our true selves.

Teri Vlassopoulos is the author of Living Expenses (Invisible Publishing, 2025), Escape Plans (Invisible Publishing, 2015) and Bats or Swallows (Invisible Publishing, 2010). Her fiction and non-fiction have been published in Room Magazine, Today’s Parent, Catapult, The Millions, The Rumpus, The Toast, Open Book, and more. She has been nominated for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, and she sits on the Board of Directors of the FOLD (the Festival of Literary Diversity). Teri lives in Toronto.

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Amanda Fields and Eva Langston chat with Brittany Micka-Foos, author of It’s No Fun Anymore, about domestic horror tropes and how a neurodiversity diagnosis offered insight into writing and motherhood. The lack of safety felt in womanhood and discomfort that lies within it is the discussion that Brittany strives to acknowledge and pursue. Her most recent book is a collection of eight short stories that explore the politics of victimization, the sites of trauma on women’s bodies, and women’s attempts to divine meaning from suffering.

Brittany is the author of the poetry chapbook a litany of words as fragile as window glass (Bottlecap Press, 2024). Her work has been published in Ninth Letter, Witness Magazine, NonBinary Review, Hobart, Literary Mama, Identity Theory, and elsewhere. A former victim’s rights lawyer in Washington, DC, she turned to writing after the birth of her first child.

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Literary Mama Essay (2023)

Amanda and Eva chat with Domenica Ruta, author of All the Mothers, about a new dialectic in motherhood, the specific anxieties of single moms, and the necessity of single mom communities. She also explores the trials of the family court system and the realities of what those minefields can mean for single moms.

Domenica’s latest book, All the Mothers, is a novel that follows three single mothers in New York whose kids share the same deadbeat father. The protagonists Sandy, Stephanie, and Kaya eventually meet and begin to redefine family structure as single mothers. As they try to stay afloat financially while raising their children, and as these children grow and change, the father, Justin, creates numerous roadblocks and conflict along the way. Overall, this novel is real and funny, all while aptly narrating the intense struggles of single mothers, who are often judged for not maintaining the status quo.

Domenica Ruta is the New York Times bestselling author of the memoir With or Without You and the novel The Last Day. She teaches in the creative writing program at Sarah Lawrence College, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Cut, The American Scholar, Oprah online, and many others.

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Eva Langston and Amanda Fields chat with Jessie Harrold, author of Mothershift, about matrescence - the process of becoming a mother, the four radical transformations, and the seven mother powers. Jessie explains how mothers can be agents of change, and how modern mothers in crisis can step into their innate powers to reclaim themselves.

Mothershift is the first book of its kind to dive deeply into the science and soul of matrescence, the 2-3 year transition into motherhood. Mothershift helps mothers identify the cascade of changes they can expect as they enter motherhood, normalizes the feelings of grief and loss of self they may feel along the way, and reassures them that they are not broken, they are becoming. The book helps readers cultivate a sense of empowerment and leadership in motherhood, showing how mothering is a counterculture act. Mothershift is a Nautilus Gold Medal winner, has been featured in international media, and is being recognized as contributing to a pivotal development in our understanding of matrescence.

Jessie Harrold is a coach and doula who has been supporting women through radical life transformations and other rites of passage for over fifteen years. She works one-on-one with women and mothers, facilitates mentorship programs, women’s circles and rituals, and hosts retreats and nature-based experiences. Jessie is the author of Mothershift: Reclaiming Motherhood as a Rite of Passage (Shambhala 2024) and Project Body Love: my quest to love my body and the surprising truth I found instead. She is also the host of The Becoming Podcast. Jessie lives on the east coast of Canada where she mothers her two children, writes, and stewards the land.

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Holly Rizzuto Palker and Eva Langston chat with Liz Alterman, author of Sad Sacked, about the perils and freedoms of unemployment, the dichotomy of working moms, and the need to write the book you want to read. Diving deep into her own family’s dual layoffs, Liz’s memoir uses humor as a healing force as she details the downsizing and uploading of life’s losses and wins.

Liz Alterman is the author of the young adult thriller, He’ll Be Waiting, the suspense novels The Perfect Neighborhood, The House on Cold Creek Lane, and You Shouldn’t Have Done That, as well as the romcom Claire Casey’s Had Enough. Liz’s most recent literary thriller, A Different Type of Poison, was just released this week. Her work has been published by The New York Times, The Washington Post, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and other outlets. Subscribe to her Substack where she shares the ups and downs of the writing life (and cat photos). Liz lives in New Jersey with her husband, three sons and two cats. She spends most days repeatedly microwaving the same cup of coffee and looking up synonyms.

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