Sarah J. Robbins is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor whose work has appeared in Newsweek, Glamour, Marie Claire, Real Simple, and Publishers Weekly magazines, among others. She coordinates Glamour magazine's annual Women of the Year Fund initiative and is the former managing director of Girls Write Now, Inc., a New York-based mentoring program. An adjunct professor with the Bard Prison Initiative, Robbins is the co-author, with Dr. Hawa Abdi, of Keeping Hope Alive: One Woman—90,000 Lives Changed, released by Grand Central Publishing in April 2013. 

For more than a decade, Monique van der Vorst was unable to walk, due to a surgery gone awry. Now she’s on her feet. She tells her remarkable tale.