What It Takes To Heal

I love this book. Hemphill offers us a visionary, personal, compassionate, empowering guide for our healing as individuals, within the histories of our families, and deep within the broader contexts of our communities, societies, and the world at large.

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK, author of The Body Keeps the Score

In a time when so many of us are being trained in cynicism, this book stands in necessary defiance.

COLE ARTHUR RILEY, author of Black Liturgies and This Here Flesh

A powerful, prescient, incisive book that helps us better understand ourselves, our relationships, and how to fully be in this world, all while creating the next.

PRIYA PARKER, author of The Art of Gathering

This book reckons with our major issues—trauma, race, social upheaval—and opens us up to the possibility that everything actually could be different. And it does so one gorgeous sentence after the next.

RESMAA MENAKEM, author of My Grandmother’s Hands

It’s a rare thing for a book to be beautifully intimate and wildly expansive at the same time, but that is precisely what What it Takes to Heal manages to be.

BRENÉ BROWN

This book will be both the 'aha' moment and the balm for so many people who are saddled with vacant platitudes that don't give them a way forward. It is what we need in this moment and will be foundational for generations to come.

TARANA BURKE, author of Unbound

Hemphill teaches us where healing begins, and how crucial our healing is for the worlds we want to conjure.

adrienne maree brown, author of Emergent Strategy and Pleasure Activism

In the tradition of James Baldwin, Hemphill invites us in close and personal to experience life, pain, beauty, injustice and healing. I’ll read this again and again.

STACI K. HAINES, author of The Politics of Trauma