About Ken Brack
Ken Brack is a narrative nonfiction author moved by how people grow through catastrophic ordeals.
His new book, Especially For You, (published in late October 2017) tells the wrenching and ultimately uplifting stories of families who find a new purpose after unspeakable loss. The work casts fresh light on our responses to horrific ordeals, including healing oneself by lifting others up. Driven by an arresting emotional intimacy in the author’s narrative voice, the book speaks passionately to readers trying to make sense of calamity and to our shared capacity to transform pain into something good.
Brack's debut, Closer By The Mile, is the story of the country’s leading single-event athletic fundraiser, the Pan-Mass Challenge bike-a-thon for cancer research. A native of Natick, Ma., he blogs for Psychology Today’s website and other publications, and in 2008 co-founded a nonprofit bereavement center, Hope Floats Healing and Wellness Center, in Kingston, Ma. A longtime journalist in New England, Brack has a M.Ed. from Northeastern University and taught high school English in Boston.
Ken is a sporadic poet, lifelong guitarist, landscaper and organic gardener, a sailor of Buzzards Bay who also finds solace in Machias Bay, and a proud father and husband.
His LinkedIn profile is http://www.linkedin.com/pub/ken-brack/18/15b/b67
Ken's email is brackskd@comcast.net. His author's page on Facebook is www.facebook.com/authorkenbrack
Hope Floats Healing and Wellness Center, Inc.
In 2008 Denise and Ken Brack created a bereavement an educational center called Hope Floats in Kingston, Ma., born in part from the loss of their son Michael in 2002. They established a nonprofit center in a restorative, retreat setting where people can deal with their life struggles and improve their wellness. Having learned how such a loss can be devastating and isolating, the couple wanted to offer support and resources for others going through similar crises.
Hope Floats’ mission remains focused on two core areas: providing free support groups, fee-based counseling, and healing workshops to help people grieve or face other struggles; and offering wellness classes and retreats with practitioners experienced in an array of mind-body-spirit healing arts. Support services are offered for children, teens, and their caregivers; for adults who have lost a child, a partner or spouse, suicide loss, and overdose loss, and perinatal-infant loss. Denise Brack is the center’s executive director and visionary, while Ken assists with operational planning and maintenance.
Denise and Ken continue to be lifted up by people who find help and often give back to Hope Floats. The center has given emotional, therapeutic and wellness supports to some 3,000 individuals while growing organically. In 2017 it was affiliated with six experienced counselors and many practitioners licensed in a variety of wellness and healing practices. The center collaborates with Cranberry Area Hospice of Plymouth, which provides nurturing support groups and family programs, and Hope Floats is connected to a larger community of bereavement centers and practitioners through leading centers in Massachusetts and the National Alliance for Grieving Children.