My recently completed book, “Every Time I Didn't Say No: A Memoir on Consent,” explores my experiences and struggle to understand healthy boundaries. Never having known my father, and raised by a volatile, mentally unstable mother, my earliest concept of “consent” was to avoid conflict at any cost. Unsupervised and unprotected, I was an ideal target for predatory men. Molested as a young child, statutorily and forcibly raped as a teen, and through an emotionally and sexually abusive marriage, I tried to protect myself from conflict by not saying, “no.” Taking place in settings ranging from New Mexico and Nigeria to Scotland and an Ivy League campus, my memoir explores the black, white, and gray areas of consent and my struggle to find strength and resilience, then boundaries and the power of saying “no” in relationships. After dropping out of public school at sixteen, I earned my GED and took courses at a junior college. Eventually earning acceptance at Columbia University, I graduated magna cum laude with degrees in literature and creative writing, and my thesis, which I later turned into a work of literary fiction, was awarded the highest honors. My unlikely journey led to three graduate degrees and a career as an instructional coach and professional trainer in the field of education. I now specialize in training classroom teachers, both individually and in groups, in effective strategies for teaching students with little knowledge of English, specifically children and young adults entering public schools directly from refugee camps. I am regularly engaged internationally as a professional public speaker, often training audiences that number in the hundreds, and have given numerous keynote speeches in the United States and abroad.

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