I’ve always been paying attention.
When I was three years old, I fell out of a moving car and lay in the street smiling at the clouds while adults panicked around me.

I am a work in progress.

I stand on the shoulders of unlikely ancestors: a Swedish Methodist minister, a feisty German brothel owner, and grandparents shaped by war, silence, illness, and reinvention. I come from people who made meaning however they could—through faith, language, invention, and love. That inheritance lives in my work.

I am an educator.

Because my own brain learned language differently, I understand how vulnerable it can feel to share work in progress. I lift up the voices of the students I teach, curating spaces where stories are told out loud, risk is honored, and people discover their voices matter. I aim to be the teacher I was once looking for.

I am a survivor.

My life, like many lives, has been shaped by loss and rupture as well as love and continuity. Survival, for me, isn’t about endurance alone—it’s about attention, choice, and staying open. It’s about living fully alongside complicated grief, while still making room for joy, humor, and meaning. That sensibility lives in everything I write.

I’m glad you’re here.
Amy E. Witting