Welcome!
My name is DEVAN SANDIFORD. I’m a published writer, an award-winning storyteller, and a storytelling coach. My stories have been featured in the Washington Post, The Moth Radio Hour and Podcast, Speak Up Storytelling, Simple Families Podcast, Writing Class Radio, and many other outlets. I have been interviewed by The New York Times and Washington Post to talk about race, identity, parenting, grief, and storytelling. I have also received acclaim from multiple New York Times bestselling authors, including Roxane Gay who called me:
“An excellent writer who will be endlessly interesting to his reader.”
But also know that is not even close to where my story began… My story began when I was a six-year-old boy, growing up in South Miami Heights, Florida.
My Story
When I was six years old, my Uncle Ron was shot and killed by the police steps outside of our home—an incident that was so painful that nobody in my family ever spoke about it.
Being the youngest in my family and faced with the silence around my uncle’s death and life, I saw how much even the thought of this massive loss hurt my mom to hold and I never wanted to add the grief I was feeling to the weight I knew she was carrying after having to witness her brother’s last moments. So, I decided that the best way for me to deal with my pain and sorrow was to push it down, pretend like nothing was wrong, and move on.
For twenty-eight years that’s exactly what he did. I hid all the sorrow I felt for my mom, my dad, my sister and brother, my friends, and, later on in life, from my wife. I got so good at it that I even learned to hide my sorrows from himself to the point my life was always filled with peace and happiness.
But then I became a father, having two sons of my own and I saw how the silence I had been carry had become a burden I was passing on to my own sons. Devastated by the hard truth that it was me, not even the world, who was hurting my sons, I decided I would do just about anything to rid myself of the silence I had been carry for three decades.
I stepped on a personal storytelling stage, where I knew I could release my stories without having them land on my mom—the best of both words: getting the stories I had carried out of my body without having to hurt my mom with all the pain it would bring to her to relive the pain.
DEVAN SANDIFORD is a poet, essayist, and award-winning storyteller. His stories have been featured in the Washington Post, The Moth Radio Hour and Podcast, Writing Class Radio, Speak Up Storytelling, and other outlets. He is a Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA) alumni and a recipient of the Corporeal Writing Scholarship for Writing Trauma Toward Healing and Joy. He has contributed his opinion on grief, race & identity, parenting, and storytelling for articles in The New York Times and Washington Post. He has also received acclaim from multiple New York Times bestselling authors, including Roxane Gay who said he is “an excellent writer who will be endlessly interesting to his readers”, Terese Maria Mailhot who remarked he “wills himself from one thought to the next with a work that has momentum and fluidity”, and Nancy French who shared he “has a unique perspective” and is “able to navigate the complicated issues facing modern America with a deft, compassionate touch.”
