We're thrilled to welcome Melody Schreiber in conversation with Tyrese Coleman and Jonahtan Freeman-Coppadge for What We Didn't Expect: Personal Stories About Premature Birth! This event will be held digitally via Crowdcast. Click here to register for the event with a donation of any amount of your choice. Donations will go to Hand to Hold, a nonprofit that helps families before, during, and after a NICU stay and infant loss by providing powerful resources for the whole family, and most importantly, one-on-one mentoring from someone who has been there.You can order the book below and there will also be an option to buy the book during the event.

One in ten babies are born premature in the United States. That’s 400,000 families who go through this every year, or more than a thousand every single day.

But that one word, “preemie,” encompasses a range of medical and cultural experiences. For example, black parents give birth prematurely 50 percent more than white parents, and preemies of color immediately experience discrimination in the NICU, research has shown.

What We Didn't Expect: Personal Stories About Premature Birth features diverse voices and experiences of premature birth—from health and income inequalities to mental health; from faith and community to adoption; from practical advice on raising a premature baby to approaching loss and grief—in compelling, relatable stories.

Melody Schreiber is a freelance journalist and the D.C. correspondent for ArcticToday. Her work has been published by The Washington Post, The Guardian, Wired, The Atlantic, Pacific Standard, USA Today, Outside, The New Republic, NPR, and elsewhere. She was awarded journalism fellowships from the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) in 2019 and the GroundTruth Project in 2015–2016. Find her at @m_scribe on Twitter and Instagram.

Tyrese L. Coleman is the author of the collection How to Sit, a 2019 Pen Open Book Award finalist published with Mason Jar Press in 2018. Writer, wife, mother, attorney, and writing instructor, she is a contributing editor at Split Lip Magazine. Her essays and stories have appeared in several publications, including Black Warrior Review, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, and the Kenyon Review, and noted in Best American Essays. She is an alumni of the writing program at Johns Hopkins University. Find her at @tylachelleco on Twitter.

Jonathan Freeman-Coppadge is the fiction editor at Oyster River Pages and a high school English teacher. His latest work appears in Embark Literary Journal, Italian Americana, and Rainbow in the Word: LGBTQ Christians’ Biblical Memoirs (Wipf and Stock, 2017). He lives with his husband and their son in Maryland. Find him at @jdcoppadge on Twitter.

Melody Schreiber, Tyrese Coleman and Jonathan Freeman-Coppadge for WHAT WE DIDN'T EXPECT