Books
Non-fiction & Poetry
Women in a Golden State: California Poets at 60 and Beyond
Edited by Diana Raab & Chryss Yost
Gunpowder Press
Women in a Golden State includes poems and micro-essays from across California, ranging from awarded Poets Laureate to emerging writers who are finding new forms of expression. The collection examines the mythology and reality of being a woman of a certain age, especially in youth-obsessed California, inviting its readers to reconsider aging not as an end, but as an ongoing journey—one filled with beauty, strength, and boundless possibilities.
Hummingbird: Messages from My Ancestors
A Memoir with Reflection and Writing Prompts
Modern History Press
Hummingbird is a spiritual memoir about the connection between three generations of women--the author, her mother and her beloved maternal grandmother whose wisdoms taught the author how to exist in the world by following her intuition and listening to her heart. Follow Diana on a journey of more than five decades as an author, nurse, research psychologist, teacher, cancer survivor, and more. With insightful prompts, the reader is also invited to explore their own ancestral connections.
Praise for Hummingbird
“In this powerful and timely memoir Raab offers poignant and thoughtful insights to contemplate and reflect upon to help heal intergenerational trauma. Raab rightly reminds us that our ancestors live on in us, and we are invited to call on them anytime we need help navigating life’s challenges.”
—SONIA CHOQUETTE, New York Times bestselling author of The Answer is Simple and Ask Your Guides
An Imaginary Affair
Poems Whispered to Neruda
Finishing Line Press
An Imaginary Affair is a collection of sensitive and sensuous poems for poets and non-poets who appreciate the challenges and intricacies of being human. The poems touch on key human elements, such as love, desire, passion, memory, loss, and gratitude. The poet celebrates the joys, and pains inherent to a woman’s heart, while honoring the wisdoms and tones of Neruda’s poetry. Some of the epistolary poems are directed to Neruda in response to his riveting poems
Praise for An Imaginary Affair
“Written in response to lines by the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, these poems have a daring directness and vulnerability. These are not poems that hide their emotion behind artifice. They explore the beginnings – and inevitable endings – of attraction with a tender and elemental honesty.”
—SUE WILLIAM SILVERMAN, author, If the Girl Never Learns
Writing for Bliss
A Memoir with Reflection and Writing Prompts
Loving Healing Press
Writing for Bliss is most fundamentally about reflection, truth, and freedom. With techniques and prompts for both the seasoned and novice writer, it will lead you to tap into your creativity through storytelling and poetry, examine how life-changing experiences can inspire writing, pursue self-examination and self-discovery through the written word, and, understand how published writers have been transformed by writing.
Praise for Writing For Bliss
“By listening to ourselves and what we are saying and feeling the true story of our life’s past experience is revealed. Diana Raab’s book gives us the insights by which we can achieve this through her life coaching wisdom and our writing.”
—BERNIE SIEGEL, MD, author of The Art of Healing and 365 Prescriptions For The Soul
Writing for Bliss
A Companion Journal
Loving Healing Press
Developed for the seasoned storyteller, as well as the emerging author, this interactive journal is designed to be used in conjunction with Writing for Bliss: A Seven-Step Plan for Telling Your Story and Transforming Your Life—or as a standalone workbook for reflection and self-discovery.
Praise for Writing For Bliss: A Companion Journal
“If you’ve ever wished for writing prompts that promote peace and personal growth, this is it. From releasing the past to creating a vision for the future, the topics are as diverse as they are helpful. Dr. Raab’s journal is a healing companion to her book, Writing for Bliss!”
—BRENDA STOCKDALE, PhD
Writers and Their Notebooks
Foreword by Phillip Lopate
University of South Carolina Press
This collection of essays by well-established writers explores how their notebooks serve as their studios and workshops―places to collect, to play, and to make new discoveries with language, passions, and curiosities. For these writers, the journal also serves as an ideal forum to develop their writing voice, whether crafting fiction, nonfiction, or poetry. Through their individual approaches to keeping a notebook, the contributors offer valuable advice, personal recollections, and a hardy endorsement of the value of using notebooks to document, develop, and nurture a writer's creative spark.
Praise for Writers and Their Notebooks
“Writers And Their Notebooks is an anthology of essays by established and professional writers, discussing the value of simple notebooks to collect ideas, play around with words, discover new insights into evoking emotion with language, and much more. From sample journal entries that evolved into published pieces, to valuable advice for aspiring writers, to individual approaches to notebook keeping and much more, Writers And Their Notebooks is filled with tips, tricks, and techniques for getting creative juices flowing. An excellent supplementary reference for any would-be writer’s shelf.”
—MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW
Lust
Wordwrite Book Award Winner - 3rd Place
CW Books
A passionate journey through private emotional moments, Diana Raab's Lust voices the pain of loneliness and the heart's yearning for love while transcending the depths of human desire. In her fourth book of poetry, Raab employs narrative verse that is alive, titillating, and seductive. Lust examines the emotional and physical complexity of love, helping readers navigate the risks of intimacy as we move toward the realization that every experience enriches our lives, whether we perceive it as joy, pain, or out of the ordinary. Yet for all their psychological richness, the poems's simplicity and accessibility will resonate with women and men across all walks of life. Lust is a book you won't put down and won't soon forget.
Praise for Lust
“Diana Raab’s poetry collection, Lust, will make you fall head-over- heels in love with words. Words that are strung together, knotted like a perfect strand of opera length pearls. Some read like heartbreaking short stories. Some read like pieces of your soul. Some read like scented love-letters. Some like tearful, regretful voice messages. If you want to have a love affair with the written word, please, read this collection. It will make you a believer. Or maybe…just maybe, it will make you a believer in the pure absolute beauty of Diana Raab.”
—AMY FERRIS, author of Marrying George Clooney and Confessions From A Midlife Crisis
Writers on the Edge: 22 Writers Speak about Addiction and Dependency
Foreword by Jerry Stahl
Modern History Press
Writers On The Edge offers a range of essays, memoirs and poetry written by major contemporary authors who bring fresh insight into the dark world of addiction, from drugs and alcohol, to sex, gambling and food. Editors Diana M. Raab and James Brown have assembled an array of talented and courageous writers who share their stories with heartbreaking honesty as they share their obsessions as well as the awe-inspiring power of hope and redemption.
Praise for Writers on the Edge
“All addictions, at bottom, are the same; and each of us who battles addiction is different. I dove into Writers On The Edge. When I came up for air, I knew that I was in good company.”
—MARY SOJOURNER, author of She Bets Her Life: A True Story of Gambling Addiction
Listening to Africa
A joyous poetic journey of words and photos
Antrim House
Poet Diana M. Raab travels to the heart of Africa with her family to experience the beauty and fascination of another world. During her safari, she observes the distress, the delight, and the dignity of the humans and animals who live there and parallels them with her own quest for health.
Praise for Listening to Africa
“Diana M. Raab makes a pilgrimage from the ‘familiar neon of home’ in Amercia to Africa, bringing her family, her passion and her pen. Her moving words carry us with her in narrative poems replete with vision, humor, and irony. In her inner and outer journey, the poet transforms fear and sadness into beauty and love as her heart opens ‘in this place which will remind you of your reason for living.”
—SUSAN WOOLDRIDGE, author of Poemcrazy: freeing your life with words
Healing with Words
A Writer’s Cancer Journey
Loving Healing Press
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 cancer—multiple myeloma. The 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.
Praise for Healing with Words
“Diana 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
The Guilt Gene
Plain View Press
A memoir in poetry that explores guilt, memory, and identity through personal reflections on family and loss. Raab’s poems are intimate and honest, focusing less on story and more on emotional insight and self-understanding. Overall, it’s a reflective, accessible collection about healing and making sense of the past.
Praise for The Guilt Gene
“The Guilt Gene is a prism with a hundred facets offering glance and glimpse and deep seeing into encounters with love, loss, longing, and epiphany. From an author who has taught us the power of memory and story, these poems take us along the road from a World War II typewriter to the eyes of an old dog. Poetry here reminds us to heed what calls to us daily.”
—KIM STAFFORD, The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer's Craft
“The poems in Diana Raab’s The Guilt Gene deftly delineate the stages of a woman’s life. From the quotidian chores of walking the dog and picking up dry cleaning to the small miracle of finding three whole watermelons on the beach, Raab savors her American life and invites you to join her.”
—MOLLY FISK, Listening to Winter
Dear Anaïs
My Life in Poems for You
Plain View Press
“In Diana Raab’s ‘imaginary world . . . people drip with stories / and linger in bookstores and cafes / slurping foamy cappuccinos / and nibbling chocolate cake.’ And the poems in Dear Anais are, indeed, rife with both stories and the extravagantly various things of this world: Laundromats and writers’ conferences, steel-tipped boots and champagne, patched jeans and paramedics, blueberries and autographed photos of Paul Newman. While the book does pay homage to Anais Nin—to her eroticism and wry humor and exquisite journals—it also vividly evoke’s Raab’s own life, particularly her family memories. Like Nin, Raab is indefatigable in her desire to commit one woman’s life to paper.”
—DAVID STARKEY, author of Ways of Being Dead
“Diana M. Raab’s Dear Anais: My Life in Poems for You is not only a tribute to the late diarist, but also a tribute to diaries themselves. Each of the book’s poems, culled from Raab’s own journal, offers intimate portraitures, tiny memoirs in verse. Raab’s poetry is seductive in its earnestness, appealing in its vulnerability, mystery, and enchantment.”
—DENISE DUHAMEL, author of Two and Two
Regina’s Closet
Finding My Grandmother’s Secret Journal
Beaufort Books
When glamorous Regina inexplicably ends her own life, her ten-year-old grand-daughter Diana is devasted by the loss and haunted by questions she never got to ask her grandmother. Three decades later, Diana discovers her grandmother's journal which gives Diana a window into the unknown events of Regina's tumultuous life, including surviving World War I, the heartbreak of being orphaned, and the pandemonium of events during her immigrations from Poland to Vienna to Paris and finally to the United States. Diana draws strength from her grandmother's example, which sustains her when she receives some of her own shattering news. To share her personal story, Diana must first tell Regina's. The end result is a unique braided narrative, creating a touching portrait between granddaughter and grandmother, their past and present, loves and losses, and the discovery of their shared legacy.
Praise for Regina’s Closet
“The book is remarkable for its large sweep of history as well as for the intimate details of everyday life, of which the journal itself—’a plastic sheath filled with papers’—is the most poignant.”
—KYOKO MORI, author of The Dream of Water: A Memoir and Polite Lies