When you’re suffering—enduring some kind of rage or heartbreak, disappointment or plain human idiocy—it can feel like you’re alone, like you’re the only person who’s struggling this way. Often, the impulse in those moments is not to share or create but to hide. 

At 22, a leukemia diagnosis sent Suleika Jaouad into exactly that kind of retreat. But a year later, faced with a grim prognosis, she realized she didn’t want to wallow—she wanted to make something useful, even beautiful. It started with a daily journal and eventually became “Life, Interrupted,” the Emmy award-winning New York Times column and video series she wrote from her hospital bed.

In her work since then, be it reporting features on the prison system or founding a global creativity project called the Isolation Journals, she has continued excavating taboos and exploring the in-between places—the people and topics that elude easy categorization. In her writing, speaking, and advocacy work, she travels to where the silence is.

“This is a deeply moving and passionate work of art, quite unlike anything I’ve ever read. I will remember these stories for years to come, because Suleika Jaouad has imprinted them upon my heart.”

—Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love