BRATTLEBORO – For poet, educator, and community organizer Diana Whitney, adolescence isn’t just a stage of life. It’s a terrain she has spent decades revisiting – as a survivor, as a mother, and now as the author of “Girl Trouble,” a new poetry collection that excavates the emotional and cultural landscape of girlhood from the 1980s to the #MeToo era.
The book, out April 7 from CavanKerry Press, arrives at what Whitney calls “a critical cultural moment,” one in which conversations about sexual violence, gender, and power are both urgent and deeply contested.
In the press release announcing the collection, she describes the work as “a full-throated roar” against silence and a celebration of survival, adding, “This book is for anyone who is moving through trauma with resilience … It’s about releasing shame and honoring our long, complex journeys as survivors.”
Whitney began writing “Girl Trouble” during the pandemic lockdown, when her daughters were in middle and high school – the same ages she was writing about. That overlap created a kind of double exposure: her own memories layered over the realities her children were navigating.
“Girl Trouble” blends personal narrative with broader cultural critique – from the 1980s “rape culture” she grew up in to the high-profile cases of Jeffrey Epstein and Larry Nassar.
“It became a very visceral remembering of what it was like to be in junior high and high school,” she said in an interview with the Reformer, recalling the songs that often stir memories, some welcome and some not so welcome. “The music was inseparable from my experience of girlhood – longing, crushes, self-hatred, wanting to be popular.”
Music threads through the book, from Pretty in Pink-era soundtracks to 1990s feminist anthems. One poem uses the lyrics of Courtney Love’s “Asking for It” as an acrostic – a structural echo of the era’s raw, confrontational energy.
“It felt really liberatory and empowering,” Whitney said. “I wanted to catch that energy in the book.”
As her daughters moved through adolescence, Whitney found herself confronting the same cultural forces she writes about – dress-coding, misogyny, and the casual circulation of violence.
“As a survivor, everything gets activated right away. You go into that fight-flight-freeze mode.”
The poems wrestle with that tension between wanting to protect and needing to let go. In one piece set on a haunted hayride, a group of girls kicks at costumed attackers while the mother-speaker watches:
“Wild girl-laughter, a spell of protection / now they know they can defend themselves.”
Whitney said the scene captures a truth about parenting teens: “Sometimes you have to step back and watch, even when the most brutal things can happen.”
Some of the book’s most striking poems are acts of revision – rewriting the past to reclaim agency. Whitney describes them as “fun,” but also deeply healing.
She reimagines her seventh-grade self navigating today’s digital world or attending a prom with the girl she once had a crush on – a possibility that felt unthinkable in the 1980s.
“To do that on the page, as a 50-year-old, was healing,” she said. “I want to encourage all of us to go back, in whatever medium we have.”
Though Whitney is a former Rhodes Scholar and once served as the poetry critic for The San Francisco Chronicle, her work is deeply tied to Vermont. She organizes with Out in the Open, a rural LGBTQ+ nonprofit, and her poems are steeped in the region’s landscape and community life.
Asked how she envisions the world her daughters will inherit, Whitney didn’t offer easy optimism.
“We’re in a long-haul transformation,” she said. “We’re living through the excruciating backlash to movements toward equality and justice. I don’t know if I’ll see the world I imagine in my lifetime. I hope our kids will.”
Still, she believes in the work – writing, organizing, storytelling – as a way of planting seeds.
“We’re keeping the vision alive,” she said. “A world where we get to feel safe in our bodies. Where children are protected.”
Whitney will celebrate the release of “Girl Trouble” with a free public event at Next Stage Arts in Putney on Friday, April 10, at 7:30 p.m. The evening will include readings, a community supper beforehand, and a dance party featuring 1980s and ’90s music – the soundtrack of the world she’s revisiting and rewriting.
