What It Takes to Heal

“I love this book. In What it Takes to Heal, Prentis Hemphill offers us a visionary, personal, compassionate, empowering guide for our healing as individuals, within the histories of our families, and deep within the broader contexts of our communities, societies, and the world at large, showing us that the journey to the restoration of our most whole selves contains the vision and path toward a world where healing and wholeness are possible for us all.”

—Bessel van der Kolk, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Body Keeps the Score

"In a time when so many of us are being trained in cynicism, What it Takes to Heal stands in necessary defiance. Through their own memories, clinical trauma expertise, and social praxis, Hemphill reminds us that an ethic of repair is never futile, every page a portal to an emotional, embodied, interior and collective healing. Hemphill―with rare wisdom and nuance―writes as one well-acquainted with the terrors of this world, and the clarity of someone who refuses to be reduced to them."

—Cole Arthur Riley, author of Black Liturgies and This Here Flesh

“At long last, Prentis Hemphill has chosen to write what they have long known, practiced, taught, and embodied – that healing and social change are not disconnected, but are, when connected, the way through. This is a powerful, prescient, incisive book that helps us better understand ourselves, our relationships, and how to fully be in this world, all while creating the next.”

—Priya Parker, author of The Art of Gathering

“With What it Takes to Heal, Prentis Hemphill has delivered the profoundly deep and transformational book we so desperately need. It’s a book that reckons with our major issues—trauma, race, social upheaval—and opens us up to the possibility that everything actually could be different. And it does so one gorgeous sentence after the next.”

—Resmaa Menakem, author of My Grandmother’s Hands

“In a time when we have become conditioned to ingest quick fixes and surface level attempts at guidance that fail to carry us through these tumultuous times, Prentis has zeroed in on the missing link. Patience and clarity. What it Takes to Heal does the patient, audacious work of mapping out the connective tissue between the traumas we hold in our bodies and the larger social justice issues in the world. This book will be both the 'aha' moment and the balm for so many people who are saddled with vacant platitudes that don't give them a way forward. It is what we need in this moment and will be foundational for generations to come.”

—Tarana Burke, author of Unbound

 "'It's hard to heal when you're still being hurt.' Prentis Hemphill has written us a gift, weaving intimate memories and skilled embodiment into an offering that is relevant to all of us committed to healing, even as the pain of being human persists. This map of prayer shows us what to build, within ourselves and between each other, in order to live beautiful lives together. Prentis teaches us where healing begins, and how crucial our healing is for the worlds we want to conjure."

—adrienne maree brown, author of Emergent Strategy and Pleasure Activism

“In the tradition of James Baldwin, Hemphill invites us in close and personal to experience life, pain, beauty, injustice and healing. This book invokes complexity and doesn’t look to resolve it, but lovingly asks us to become more intimate with it. I’ll read this again and again.”

—Staci K. Haines, author of The Politics of Trauma