Maria Brandt is a Sicilian- and Polish-American writer and teacher of writing with ancestral roots in Bensonhurst and Speonk. Her personal history is marked by powerful sisters, lost mothers and babies, the churning waters of Long Island, and a changing relationship with both home and Catholicism. Also informed by decades of scholarly and activist analysis of violence and its representations, her creative work consistently holds up a light to the small ways broken people heal. In particular, she probes how intergenerational trauma is reinforced by cultural narratives that imprint upon gender and sexual identity, and her aim is to disrupt these narratives by examining the material present of scene and then excavating the more abstract shadows of history and character. Always, she is interested in the power and illusions of gender, the redemptive potential of kindness, and the surprising ways paying attention can change everything.