When Amanda Blackwood  finally managed to get away from the man who was trafficking her, she was thirty-one years old and didn’t know what she’d gone through even had a name, much less how to deal with the pain of feeling like a broken person, unworthy of love and filled with so much anger. On a freezing cold day in 2018 she saw former trafficked people standing strong and showing their beautiful resiliency on a stage at an anti-trafficking event. At that moment she finally knew what her purpose in life would be.

Since then, Amanda has spoken on a multitude of stages, been interviewed by the Chicago Tribune, sold her art all over the country, been a keynote speaker at international summits, loaned her voice to multiple radio programs, and published over a dozen books.