In honor of National Suicide Prevention Week, this selection comes from Shaindel Beers’s book, Secure Your Own Mask available from White Pine Press. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.

Shaindel Beers is author of the poetry collections A Brief History of Time (Salt Publishing, 2009), The Children’s War and Other Poems (Salt, 2013), and Secure Your Own Mask (White Pine Press, 2018). Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She is currently an instructor of English at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, Oregon, in eastern Oregon’s desert, and serves as poetry editor of Contrary.

Nilsa Rivera writes about gender and diversity issues (including domestic violence, child neglect, homelessness, and sexual abuse). She’s also the Managing Editor of The Wardrobe for Sundress Publications. Nilsa’s work appears in the Huffington Post, 50 GS Magazine, Six Hens Literary Journal, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, and Selkie Literary Magazine. It’s also been featured at Miami Book Fair’s LipService True Stories out Loud Miami, the Writing Class Radio podcast, and at the “Muses and Music” multidisciplinary event of the Cream Literary Alliance.