Blogs

In One Heart with Courage: Essays and Stories  (Braughler Books, 2021), Teri Rizvi brings a powerful, original voice to a collection of essays that shows why our dreams matter. Woven throughout her writings is a deep faith in what’s possible when we open our hearts. 

A journalist and storyteller who has traveled widely, Rizvi writes with grace and eloquence about her marriage, which spans two cultures and two religions in a world that’s too often divided. Her lyrical writings illuminate our shared humanity through a series of small, everyday moments — a child’s T-ball practice, a socially distanced parking lot lunch with a friend — as well as recollections of major life milestones such as joyful weddings in foreign lands. 

This debut collection explores universal themes of friendship, family and faith with vulnerability, hope and poignancy. The book takes its title from a phrase that Martin Sheen uttered when he received an honorary degree from the University of Dayton: “Remember this above all: One heart with courage is a majority.” This courage — together with a writer’s lifelong curiosity — has fueled Rizvi’s life journey, and it is one that readers will relish taking at her side.  

Edited by Julie Fanselow and illustrated by Julie Lonneman. It's available from Braughler Books, Amazon Barnes and Noble and the University of Dayton Bookstore. Read the prelude here.

The author and publisher are donating all proceeds from book sales to the Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop endowment, which helps keep the workshop affordable for writers. 

Rizvi is the founder and director of the Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop at the University of Dayton, where she serves as executive director of strategic communications. Her essays and feature stories have appeared in USA Today, The Christian Science Monitor, The Guardian (London), University of Dayton Magazine and the Dayton Daily News, among other print and online media.

She is the co-editor of Laugh Out Loud: 40 Women Humorists Celebrate Then and Now … Before We Forget and Sisters!, Bonded by Love and Laughter, both published in conjunction with the Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop. Her essay “As Screens Come Up, Walls Come Down” will appear in Chicken Soup for the Soul: Tough Times Won’t Last But Tough People Will in November. Another essay “Living in the Moment” will appear in Fast Fierce Women (Woodhall Press, 2022).