[Image Description: Front cover of Rebekah Palmer's book A Letter To My Friend: Sharing Truths I Learned as a Teenager. It is pink, tan, and light green with the fading of a handwritten, cursive letter as its background.]
This was my first published book through Life Sentence Publishing, now Aneko Press. I had written a journal to a friend in high school and had wanted to get my message out to other conservative Christian teenagers at the time. It wasn't until much later in 2013 I was able to do so.
[Image Description: Front cover of Rebekah Palmer's second book published by Aneko Press. The title is a Letter to Myself: Speaking Out After Silence and has the biblical verse Proverbs 31:9 written which reads, "Open thy mouth: judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy". The book is pink, yellow, and green and has images of a bird leaving its cage to a leafy tree.]
I wrote this book after first steps in healing from child sexual abuse which happened in my own life as a church-attending, good girl. It's interesting, in reflecting on myself, how much more real I have been able to get about living in a disabled body since this book was published in 2016.
[Image Description: Front cover of the cystinosis anthology Strength: Lives Touched By Cystinosis edited and compiled by Amanda Leigh and Amanda Buck. It is light blue and white and pictures a string of DNA.]
I submitted my first attempts at telling and narrating about cystinosis in poetry to this collection of stories from patients, parents, siblings, and friends touched by cystinosis. It was published in 2017. This brought me in contact with writer-peer Amanda Leigh who has work submitted in this anthology as well.
[Image Description: Front cover of Rebekah Palmer's poetry book Map of My Heart: A Portrait of the Girl Behind A Letter To My Friend. It is brown-toned with a picture of the heart organ with a world map printed across it.]
Amanda Leigh designed my cover through her company Leigh Designs in 2019. This is my first full-lengthed poetry book to give readers a feel inside the empathy of the conservative Christian teenager I was, and how I can continue to live as a reformed Christian adult.