Javier Zamora’s adventure is a three-thousand-mile journey from his small town in El Salvador, through Guatemala and Mexico, and across the U.S. border. He will leave behind his beloved aunt and grandparents to reunite with a mother who left four years ago and a father he barely remembers. Traveling alone amid a group of strangers and a “coyote” hired to lead them to safety, Javier expects his trip to last two short weeks.

Weaving personal narrative with political analysis, Community as Rebellion offers a meditation on creating liberatory spaces for students and faculty of color within academia. Much like other women scholars of color, Lorgia Garcia Peña has struggled against the colonizing, racializing, classist, and unequal structures that perpetuate systemic violence within universities.

Nothing Is Missing is a “sparkling and impassioned story” (Glamour) of what it takes to show up for yourself—and the joy that can come once you do. Raised in a home where food was unstable and anger was the norm, Nicole learned that she needed to take charge of her own safety and security. So she did: She got into an elite private school by talking to a stranger in her dad’s cab, she strategized her way onto Wheel of Fortune to pay for college, she adopted three girls after meeting their mother panhandling, she quit her job to launch her own business, and she struggled.

Kristina Kuzmic has made herself a household name, speaking directly to mothers from the trenches of parenthood via her viral videos and social media presence. She is now bringing her message of self-acceptance, resilience, and joy to audiobook listeners. With a refreshingly unpretentious, funny, and galvanizing voice, Kuzmic goes behind the scenes to reveal how she went from broke and defeated to unshakably grounded and brimming with thankfulness.

New York Times best-selling author Iyanla Vanzant recounts the last decade of her life and the spiritual lessons learned—from the price of success during her meteoric rise as a TV celebrity on Oprah, the Iyanla TV show (produced by Barbara Walters), to the dissolution of her marriage and her daughter's 15 months of illness and death on Christmas day.

Melissa Ohden is 14 when she learns she is the survivor of a botched abortion. In this intimate memoir, she details for the first time her search for her biological parents, and her own journey from anger and shame to faith and empowerment.

Life can be tough—but it helps to know other people have come through hard times with a smile on their face. In Make Your Own Sunshine, Janice Dean shares inspiring stories that will lift your spirit and touch your heart. Good people are all around us doing selfless deeds, from a firefighter who bravely battled for his colleague’s health after 9/11 to a good Samaritan who secretly pays for the coffees of everyone in line behind him. You can’t help but smile hearing about the teacher who cut her hair to make her student feel better.

Allison DuBois has had the privilege of connecting tens of thousands of people with their lost loved ones around the world. She has been invited into people's lives and experienced their stories of loss. It is not all tragedy, though. There is a recurring theme of people having forever love connections, whether they are family members, friends or couples; some call themselves soulmates. These loving relationships do not end.

Actor Jim Beaver (Supernatural, Deadwood, Justified) and his wife Cecily Adams (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's Moogie) were at the peaks of their careers and happily raising a beautiful two-year old daughter, Madeline. Then tragedy struck, not once, but twice. What followed was laid down by Jim in a moving, poignant, and uplifting journal of the following year, a year filled with heartbreak as well as enormous gifts and invaluable lessons, not just for Jim and his family but for listeners who traveled along with him on his journey.

From the founder of This Gathered Nest YouTube channel, an uplifting story of Angela Braniff’s unusual path to becoming the mother to seven children through various methods of adoption and biological approaches, encouraging women and mothers to embrace the unique purpose that God has put in their lives.

People who are not in the habit of talking with the dead have a hard time imagining what Matt Fraser’s life is like. Based on the questions he gets, they seem to think he spends most of his time sitting cross-legged in a trance, maybe hovering a few inches off the ground, leaving his physical body behind as he journeys across the veil to the spirit realm. But it’s not like that at all.

When Jessica Zimmerman’s husband Brian contracted a mysterious illness that left him 60 pounds underweight and a prisoner to their master bathroom, she had no idea the journey of self-discovery on which they were both about to embark. As Jessica and Brian worked to solve the riddle of his illness, they also had a harder question to answer: Was their marriage even worth saving?

What do you do when, just before Thanksgiving at your mother's, your 14-year-old son asks you to iron the dress he recently purchased and plans to wear? Listeners learn the answer and much more in this wonderfully frank, loving, and practical account of parenting a transgender teen. Hassouri chronicles what amounts to a dual transition: as her child transitions from male to female, she navigates through anger, denial, and grief to eventual acceptance. Despite her experience advising other parents in her work as a pediatrician, she was blindsided by her child's gender identity.

With testimonies from many people, Expect the Unexpected is an honest firsthand account of how spirits communicate with Philipps, why he believes they chose him to do this, and how he works with them to ultimately convey their messages. He offers insight and suggestions to help ask for and receive signs with or without a medium and shows why he is convinced that readings always contain the possibility for love, peace, healing, and hope.

Each generation of therapists can boast of only a few writers like Deborah Luepnitz, whose sympathy and wit shine in her fine, luminous prose. In Schopenhauer's Porcupines, she recounts five true stories from her practice, stories of patients who range from the super-rich to the destitute, who grapple with panic attacks, psychosomatic illness, marital despair, and sexual recklessness. Intimate, original, and triumphantly funny, Schopenhauer's Porcupines goes further than any other book in illuminating "how talking helps".

In this deeply moving and myth-shattering work, Ann Fessler brings out into the open for the first time the astonishing untold history of the million and a half women who surrendered children for adoption due to enormous family and social pressure in the decades before Roe v. Wade.

No two autistic children heal in exactly the same way. And in her new book, Jenny expands her message to share recovery stories from parents across the country, showing how each parent fought to find her own child's perfect "remedy of interventions." Along the way, Jenny shares her own journey as an autism advocate and mother, as well as the continuing progress of her son, Evan. Emotional and genuinely practical, Mother Warriors will inspire a generation of parents with hope.

Shyima Hall was born in Egypt on September 29, 1989, the seventh child of desperately poor parents. When she was eight, her parents sold her into slavery. Shyima then moved two hours away to Egypt's capitol city of Cairo to live with a wealthy family and serve them eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. When she was ten, her captors moved to Orange County, California, and smuggled Shyima with them. Two years later, an anonymous call from a neighbor brought about the end of Shyima's servitude - but her journey to true freedom was far from over.

New York Times best-selling author Iyanla Vanzant recounts the last decade of her life and the spiritual lessons learned—from the price of success during her meteoric rise as a TV celebrity on Oprah, the Iyanla TV show (produced by Barbara Walters), to the dissolution of her marriage and her daughter's 15 months of illness and death on Christmas day.

What does it mean to be an adult? In the 20th century, psychologists came up with five markers of adulthood: finish your education, get a job, leave home, marry, and have children. Since then, every generation has been held to those same markers. Yet so much has changed about the world and living in it since that sequence was formulated. All of those markers are choices, and they’re all valid, but any one person’s choices along those lines do not make them more or less an adult.

The death of a child is that unimaginable loss no parent ever expects to face. In Beyond Tears, nine mothers share their individual stories of how to survive in the darkest hour. They candidly share with other bereaved parents what to expect in the first year and long beyond.

Four simple phrases - "Please forgive me", "I forgive you", "Thank you", and "I love you" - carry enormous power to mend and nurture our relationships and inner lives. These four phrases and the sentiments they convey provide a path to emotional well-being, guiding us through interpersonal difficulties to life with integrity and grace. Dr. Ira Byock, an international leader in palliative care, explains how we can practice these life-affirming words in our day-to-day lives.

We've all experienced moments when we lose control of a situation and ourselves. Now, in Growing Yourself Back Up, the first book to explain the idea of emotional regression to the general listener, best-selling author John Lee identifies the circumstances that cause these seemingly uncontrollable feelings and shows how they are directly tied to our experience as children.

On January 31, 2011, Zach Wahls addressed the Iowa House Judiciary Committee in a public forum regarding civil unions. The 19-year-old son of a same-sex couple, Wahls proudly proclaimed, "The sexual orientation of my parents has had zero effect on the content of my character." Hours later, his speech was posted on YouTube, where it went viral, quickly receiving more than two million views. By the end of the week, everyone knew his name and wanted to hear more from the boy with two moms.

Transitions of the Heart is the first collection to ever invite mothers of transgender and gender variant children of all ages to tell their own stories about their child’s gender transition. Often transitioning socially and emotionally alongside their child but rarely given a voice in the experience, mothers hold the key to familial and societal understanding of gender difference.