MARY KEATING is a lawyer, disability advocate, and three-time Pushcart Prize nominated poet. After a car accident at fifteen changed the trajectory of her life, she went on to Yale Law School, worked as an attorney at IBM, founded her own law practice twice and was appointed by Governors Jodi Rell and Daniel Malloy to serve on, and later chair, the Connecticut State Rehabilitation Council. Keating lives and works in Connecticut where her firm, Mary Keating Esquire, LLC, guides clients through estate planning, trusts, and planning for long-term care and disability.

Today on our show, we sit down with Mary to talk about her new book, Recalibrating Gravity, a courageous and lyrical journey that challenges how we see the body, resilience, and what it truly means to rise when the world tries to hold you down. You See, Recalibrating Gravity is a moving reminder that even when life shifts our balance, we have the power to redefine strength, dignity, and hope.

Farmer Wayne Swanson Jr. is the owner and operator of Swanson Family Farm, LLC and began the agricultural business in 2008. His interest in farming began as a young child witnessing his grandparent’s work on their farm in New Jersey. He would later gain the experience to run and operate a successful farm. Mr. Swanson graduated from Morris Brown College with a bachelor’s degree in Mass Media Arts in 1995. He is a proud member of the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. In addition, Farmer Wayne is a co-founder of the Georgia Black-Owned Farms Tour – a tour of Black-owned Georgia-based farms and farm-to-table bistros.The Georgia Black-Owned Farms Tour celebrates ownership, and selling, preparing, and eating organic animal and vegetable produce from the land.

The land tells a different story when it’s passed down instead of taken away. For Wayne Swanson Jr., farming is not a trend, it is memory, inheritance, and resistance. From watching his grandparents work the soil in New Jersey to building Swanson Family Farm, LLC from the ground up in 2008, his journey is stitched together with sacrifice, mistakes, hard-earned wisdom, and an unshakable belief that Black farmers deserve not just survival, but ownership, healing, and prosperity. This is a story about mental health under pressure, investing when the odds are stacked against you, its conversations for the future generations that cannot afford to be disconnected from the soil again.

Deni Elliott spent much of her life proving she could do everything on her own, until losing her sight forced her to rethink what independence really means.

In her new book, Catching Sight: How a Guide Dog Helped Me See Myself (co-authored with veteran guide dog instructor Graham Buck), Elliott tells the deeply personal story of learning to trust again, this time with a yellow Labrador named Alberta. What begins as guide dog training becomes a life-changing partnership that reshapes her identity, her confidence, and her understanding of strength.

Catching Sight reveals the extraordinary communication, shared leadership, and emotional courage behind every successful guide-dog team. At its heart, this is a story about love, loss, resilience, and discovering that needing help is not weakness, but wisdom.

Deni Elliott is Project Co-Director of the National Ethics Project, a professor emeritus at the University of South Florida, and a nationally recognized expert in media ethics and disability. But in Catching Sight, her most powerful credential is this: she learned how to let herself be guided and, in doing so, finally learned how to see herself.