Published in 2019
226 pages
Cyra Perry Dougherty is a space holder for spiritual growth and healing for 21st century leaders. She began her career fighting for justice-rooted service programs in the public sector, made her way to Partners In Health, a global social justice organization. As a single mother, building her career in the social justice sector, she overextended herself and burnt out following her work in response to the earthquake that ravaged Haiti in 2010. In the years that followed, she found herself building Still Harbor, an organization committed to spiritually accompanying those engaged in social justice work, and in seminary where she was ordained an Interspiritual Minister. In seminary, she discovered the practical tools to sustain herself and others in justice work. She carries a deep respect for and understanding of the practices that can connect us to our most authentic selves, to others, and to the unknown that is greater than all of us. The majority of her work is in secular spaces where people are seeking to connect across differences, tap into a sense of personal or shared purpose, and co-create meaning that stimulates radical social transformation. Perry is the founder and CEO of Rootwise Leadership, Senior Partner at Still Harbor, and an Instructor of Leadership Programming at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Nadia Colburn has published poetry and prose in over eighty national publications including The New Yorker, The Boston Globe Magazine, The Yale Review, Slate.com, Yes! Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Conjunctions, The Denver Quarterly, American Scholar, The Harvard Review, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Southwest Review, Literary Imagination, LARB, HEart and many other places. She’s the author of the poetry book The High Shelf (2019, SPD bestseller) and a contributor to the anthology The Anatomy of Silence: 26 Stories About All the Sh*t That Gets in the Way of Talking About Sexual Violence. She holds a PhD in English from Columbia and a BA from Harvard and has taught at MIT, Lesley, Stonehill College, Grub Street, and in workshops around New England. A founding Editor at Anchor Magazine: where spirituality and social justice meet, Nadia is interested in the intersection of personal and social transformation, and the role of art in the process of change. A student of Thich Nhat Hanh and a yoga teacher, Nadia also is a passionate activist for the environment and social justice and the founder of Align Your Story teaching and coaching. She lives in Cambridge MA with her husband and two children.
What is this book about?
Before #MeToo, there was silence. Let’s talk about that silence.
The Anatomy of Silence is a collection of voices speaking out loud – often for the first time – about what it means to stay silent, to be silenced, and to break the silence that surrounds sexual violence. About how we are all complicit in creating that silence. It offers an unflinching account of how a culture of shame perpetuates a culture of violence against our bodies—and reflects on what it would take to create a world in which that silence — once broken — stays broken.
