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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