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AUTHOR INTERVIEW
By: Sarah Bricker Hunt
-----------------------------------------------------------------------Black Trans Activist Raquel Willis on Why Stories Like Hers Need to Be Heard ‘The Risk It Takes to Bloom’ author on living a life of ‘discomfort’ and how she hopes to change that for others When Raquel Willis took the stage at the National Women’s March in Washington, D.C. the day after Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, with beaming defiance and fierce resolve, she didn’t sidestep the controversial way trans women had been sidelined from the planning of the momentous occasion. “Although I’m glad to be here now, it’s disheartening that women like me were an afterthought in the initial planning of this march,” she remarked. “Many of us had to stand a little taller to be heard, and that exclusion is nothing new.” Willis has yet to let up the pressure on trans-exclusionary spaces and people since that cold winter day almost seven years ago. The Augusta, Georgia native details her life story and her ceaseless passion for advocacy in a candid new memoir, “The Risk It Takes to Bloom,” out now. Raised 6 Fab Vegas
Catholic in a Black Southern family, Willis explains how the death of her father when she was 19 contributed to years of grief, and ultimately, epiphanies about what she was meant to do with her life — how she began to truly bloom as a whole person. Willis worked as a journalist during the early part of the Black Lives Matter movement, hiding her identity while working as a news reporter.
Photo Credit: Texas Isaiah
Over time, she would publicly come out as transgender and become a powerful advocate. She served as director of communications for the Ms. Foundation for Women; as executive editor of Out magazine, where she started the award-winning Trans Obituaries Project, and as a national organizer for the Transgender Law Center. She writes about the reality of working in those
