A few days ago, her face was on a billboard in Times Square. This morning, she woke up thinking about graves.

I Am Silence Interrupted: A Griever’s Confession is unlike any grief book you have ever held. It is not a guide. It is not a formula. It is a confession – a memoir told in mosaic: lyrical essays, poems, sonnets, haiku, a psalm, spoken word, and pages bold enough to carry a single word.

Trevilia Hodge was raised in a family fluent in silence – where secrets were kept like Sunday dresses, where a child could run a household before her hands were grown, and where the truth was the only thing left unprotected. She has attended nearly three hundred funerals. She has buried parents, a child, a great love – and, hardest of all, the versions of herself built for seasons she outgrew.

This book is what happened when she stopped keeping the family’s oldest heirloom: the hush. Moving through seven movements – The Keeping, The Naming, The Unlearning, The Leaving, The Meeting, The Loving, The Rising – these pages travel from a blue house on a corner in New Jersey to the marinas of Barcelona, from a mother’s deathbed apology to a one-word memoir that will stop your breath. Read it front to back, and a life assembles itself in order. Open it to any page, and a single piece will stand up and tell you its whole truth.

And if you don’t call yourself a griever – stay anyway. We have all buried more than people.

 

Trevilia Hodge Trevilia

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Trevilia Hodge is an author and speaker whose work helps grieving people carry their loss forward — not by "moving on," but by making room for joy while honoring the love that remains. She is a Certified Grief Educator trained under David Kessler and the founder of Replace Loss with Love, a grief-through-the-arts organization. She also serves as a NAMI Sharing Hope Ambassador and is certified in Mental Health First Aide and in AI through Andrew Ng. Her specialty is compound loss — grief that stacks, loss on top of loss — and it reaches far beyond the death of loved ones. Divorce. The loss of a job. A friendship that ends. A home, a dream, an identity. Trevilia speaks to this territory from the inside: she has lost 90% of her immediate family, beginning with her mother while she was still in college, and including her father, her husband, and her youngest brother, who asked her to write the book he would never get to read. That book became her memoir, I AM Silence Interrupted: A Griever's Confession — a lifetime of losses, told honestly, with faith, anger, questions, and joy sitting alongside the grief. She writes for the whole grieving family. Her children's books — The Baby Elephant with the Blue Balloon and the Kayla & the Little Trunk Tales series — help children name big feelings and help the adults beside them know what to say. As a master class presenter for Building Esthers and a Rutgers University graduate (Communications major, Women's Studies minor), she brings grief education to churches, conferences, universities, and workplaces. She is currently serving as Miss Plus America Elite 2025–2026 and Ultimate Woman Plus America 2025–2026, and carries her message onto stages as a poet and singer as well as a speaker. Trevilia's work was featured on Tabitha Brown's "Very Good Monday", where — Tabitha could sense the emotion through the illustrations — she song Trevilia's keen sense of advocacy for those experiencing loss. That is her work in one moment: the loss is real, the love is real, and there is still hope in the middle of it. Their absence is real. So is the love that remains.