Author Spotlight: Healing with Words by Diana M. Raab

Healing With Words: A Writer's Cancer Journey is a compassionate and wry self-help memoir written by an award-winning prolific author, nurse and poet, who at the age of forty-seven found her life shattered first by a DCIS (early breast cancer) diagnosis and five years later by another, seemingly unrelated and incurable multiple myeloma. This book includes the author’s experiences, reflections, poetry and journal entries, in addition to writing prompts for readers to express their own personal story.

Raab’s journals have provided a safe haven and platform to validate and express her feelings. Raab views journaling to be like a daily vitamin – in that it heals, detoxifies and is essential for optimal health.

Readers will learn to:

Understand the importance of early cancer detection and how to take control of their health

Discover the power of writing to release bottled-up emotions

Learn how the process of journaling can facilitate healing

See how a cancer diagnosis can be a riveting event which can renew and change a person in a unique way.

Watch the Trailer!




Read the Reviews!

“Though I am a professional writer, it's hard to find words for the admiration I feel for Diana Raab and her inspiring true story: Healing With Words. Time after time, Diana articulates incisively the thoughts and feelings that convey hoped-for meaning and encouragement. She is a woman who knows what it is to live fully in the face of mortality. She will add value to the life of every person who reads this book. That she includes the creative impulse to write and the solace offered by contemplating the beautiful as a vital part of human existence resonates at a spiritual level for me.”

~ Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Ahab's Wife and Abundance, a Novel of Marie Antoinette

“One woman's story, beautifully told and inspiring to those for whom journaling will ease a breast cancer diagnosis.”

~ Barbara Delinsky, New York Times bestselling author of
Uplift: Secrets From the Sisterhood of Breast Cancer Survivors


“Healing With Words: A Writer's Cancer Journey by Diana Raab offers unique therapy for cancer patients. Raab is a registered nurse, author, mother of three and happily married woman. Her compelling and inspirational book reflects her two episodes with cancer over several years. She expertly tells her story and captures the reader with her feelings, frustrations and fears that overwhelmed her from diagnosis of breast cancer through reconstruction and recovery through her subsequent bout with multiple myeloma.

Descriptions of her personal journey are accompanied with powerful poetry and journal entries she wrote at various stages. What is unique about this book is that its messages are universal. Any cancer patient or survivor can relate to and learn from what she experienced.

Included in the masterfully written book are writing prompts to encourage the readers to write about what is happening or has occurred in their lives.

As a college writing professor, I give Diana Raab an A+ for her writing. As a twotime cancer survivor who has taught Writing for Wellness classes for patients at City of Hope Cancer Center for eight years, I congratulate her for her significant contribution to the field of writing-to-heal techniques.

Her book is a must-read for any woman diagnosed with breast cancer.”

~ Julie Davey, author of Writing for Wellness: A Prescription for Healing

You'll find more reviews posted on Diana's website.



Diana M. Raab is an essayist, memoirist, poet and author blogger who teaches in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and at various conferences around the country.
She’s editor of the anthology, Writers and Their Notebooks (University of South Carolina Press, January 2010).

Her memoir, Regina’s Closet: Finding My Grandmother’s Secret Journal (Beaufort Books, 2007) won the 2008 National Indie Excellence Award for Memoir and the 2009 Mom’s Choice Award for Adult Nonfiction.

She has three poetry collections, My Muse Undresses Me (2007), Dear Anaïs: My Life in Poems for You (2008), winner of The Reader Views Award and Allbooks Review Editor’s Choice, and The Guilt Gene (2009).

She’s the recipient of the Benjamin Franklin Book Award for best health and wellness book for Getting Pregnant and Staying Pregnant: Overcoming Infertility and High Risk Pregnancy which has been translated into French and Spanish. In 2009 the book was released in its 20th anniversary edition, under the title, Your High Risk Pregnancy: A Practical and Supportive Guide updated in collaboration with Dr. Errol Norwitz of Yale School of Medicine.

For more information about Diana and her work, please visit her online at www.dianaraab.com and at her blog: www.dianaraab.com/blog.

Look for our review of Healing With Words coming on August 24th!