Karen Brody is a mother, writer, birth advocate, and currently the founder of Daring to Rest.
After interviewing 118 women about their birth experiences she wrote Birth, a play about childbirth to, in her words, "Put pregnant mothers voices center stage." Within a year after writing Birth she founded BOLD.
BOLD was a movement that used her play Birth and Red Tents for women to tell their birth stories to help communities Be BOLD and improve birth.
After writing Birth and founding the BOLD movement, Karen created The My Body Rocks Project and The BOLD Method for Birth, an online empowerment method for pregnant women that she taught to birth professionals around the world.
She is now the founder of Daring to Rest and trains women visionaries and changemakers to share the power of rest. Her book, Daring to Rest, has helped thousands of women reclaim their power through yoga nidra, a transformational sleep practice originally from India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.
In addition to her play Birth, Karen has written two books on health and numerous magazine and blog articles on women's issues.
A few facts about Karen:
She was barred from taking an English class in college, told she wasn't a good writer, and instructed to first take a remedial class to learn how to write grammatically correctly.
She joined the Peace Corps in Belize after college.
While in the Peace Corps she loved listening to women's stories and noticed women’s voices were rarely centered in our culture.
In the Peace Corps she wrote a newsletter by hand for a year called "Out of the Jungle" from her 'hut' in the evenings under candlelight on her life and the inspiring women she met in the Peace Corps. Pre-internet, she mailed it to her mother in New York every month who photocopied it and mailed it to friends and relatives.
She spent the first decade of her life doing women's empowerment work mostly in the developing world and low income areas in New York City.
She has a masters degree in Women and International Development from The Netherlands.
She's an introvert, but when talking about women’s issues and the topic of rest she transforms into an extrovert.
She met her husband in the Peace Corps and after a long romance with plenty of theatrical twists they got married in the woods near Woodstock, New York & have been married for 28+ years.
If she wasn't championing women's issues she'd be writing about (1) her journey trying to stay rested for 4+ years while caring for her mother with Alzheimer’s and mental illness and (2) her journey with her son's severe dyslexia and how the way we educate children must change.
She now knows she's dyslexic too. (And ain't nobody gonna stop her from writing anymore :)
She was born in New York City, but still believes a mistake was made and she was supposed to have been born on a farm in Iowa.