Amy Roost grew up the daughter of a civil rights activist. The soundtrack of her childhood consisted of the nightly news with Vietnam death toll reports, live coverage of the Watergate hearings, and the the drip drip drip of the Iranian hostage crisis.
Amy’s family moved from Chicago to San Diego in 1971. Amy—who was a tomboy, overweight, and had a broken leg when she arrived at her new school—found it difficult at first to make friends. With the guidance of a stern yet loving librarian at her grade school, Amy escaped from her loneliness into the fictional worlds created by Beverly Cleary, Carolyn Keene, and C.S. Lewis.
Amy was inspired when she learned in a high school expository writing class that writing could clarify and sharpen her thoughts and opinions. She grew to love words and the satisfying feeling of putting them together in just the right order—a feeling she likens to the satisfying snaps of completing a 1,000 piece puzzle.
As a freshman attending college just blocks from the White House in Washington, DC, Amy took her first women’s studies course and was introduced to the works of Kate Chopin (The Awakening), Jane Addams (Twenty Years at Hull House), Audre Lorde (The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House), and Betty Friedan (The Feminist Mystique). Her world perspective was forever changed.
Amy’s first taste of politics had come in high school when she volunteered as a precinct walker for her congressional district’s Democratic candidate. Then in college she crossed the aisle to work as a press aide for a Republican U.S. Senator. She also worked for a political campaign consultant while in college. During her 30s Amy was absorbed in parenting a chronically ill child and providing care to her terminally ill mother, all the while working in higher education and navigating a troubled marriage.
Upon her divorce in 2005, Amy started a book marketing business. After selling the business in 2012, Amy returned full time to her passion for writing. Since that time, Amy has co-edited Ritual and Healing: Stories of Ordinary and Extraordinary Transformation (Motivational, 2013) which received the 2014 San Diego Book Association’s award for Best Nonfiction. Amy has also received numerous journalism awards for her op-ed columns appearing in San Diego Union Tribune publications. She received the 2015 KPBS Explore San Diego Fellowship, and a 2019 Annenberg Center for Health Journalism Fellowship. Among other online and print publications, Amy has written for The Writer, Guideposts, Healthline, Dame, Brain Child, Motherwell, and Rova. She is currently working on a dual memoir and an investigative podcast about the harmful effects of the pesticide chlorpyrifos—a neurotoxin that was banned until the Trump administration recently lifted the ban.
The first podcast Amy wrote and produced for Snap Judgment was submitted for a 2015 Peabody Award, and she sold film rights to the story. Amy hosts the podcast Fury, distributed by Critical Frequency Network, featuring interviews with the contributors to this anthology.
When the Access Hollywood tape was released in October 2016 in which Donald Trump boasted of grabbing women ‘‘by the pussy,” Amy’s too-long-dormant feminist alter-ego was awakened. Figuring she couldn’t be the only woman feeling assaulted and outraged, she went in search of company. She found so many women who shared her feelings and concerns that she vowed to compile their stories. Hence the inception of Fury: Women’s Lived Experiences of the Trump Era.
