Alaina Leary

Alaina Leary

Bio

Alaina Leary is an editor and activist based in Boston, MA. She is currently a social media editor for We Need Diverse Books. She has an MA in publishing from Emerson College. When she isn’t busy reading, you can find her at the beach or curled up with her girlfriend and their two adopted literary cats.

Alaina Leary Articles

How Do Memoirists Survive Telling Their Hard Stories? 

"Writing about trauma or difficult experiences doesn’t repair that trauma,” said Melanie. “It doesn’t make it go away. But I kept hearing what a transformative thing it was for [the memoirists] to shape these stories into something that they could be proud of.”

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Having A Cat Makes Me Feel Better About Being Alive

I told Winnie that I was queer before I told anyone human—late at night, in my room, after writing it down in my journal. “You won’t stop loving me if I’m gay, will you?” I asked him. He replied with his signature loud meow.

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Image credit: Christopher Flynn via Unsplash

Navigating The Trauma Of Moving

Moving can be a traumatic experience. We often forget how many remnants of the past we hold onto—whether intentionally or accidentally, just because we put a letter away in a drawer and forgot about it.

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Ways to dress like every day is Halloween!

15 Ways To Dress Like Every Day Is Halloween

The best part about Halloween is having free rein to dress a little whimsically and spooky all month long. Let's all dress like every day is Halloween!

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Genre fiction is all about knowing what has been written in the canon previously, what current trends are, what audiences are excited about, and what hasn’t yet been done.

Why Diverse Genre Fiction Is Important, And How To Get It Right

Diverse genre fiction shares a lot in common with diverse literature, in that a lot of the challenges are the same. We still have to ask a lot of questions about who gets to tell what stories, what kinds of books and authors are published, what it means to get it right, and who is on staff at the publishing houses that produce genre fiction.

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"If I could, I would almost always be outside and near the water."

#RavsWriters: Alaina Leary - Story Teller, Cat Lover, Mermaid

Welcome to #RavsWriters, an opportunity for you to get to know some of th

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" The future of ending rape culture is intersectional and inclusive. There’s no other way forward."

We Need To Remember Disability When We Talk About Sexual Assault

In the aftermath of my rape, I became an activist for ending rape culture. And I quickly found that even in feminist circles, disability was often left out of the conversation completely.

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