Member since October 2026
April Day Garcia is an author and speaker. Her memoir, The Room to Be Brave, became a #1 Amazon bestseller in Survival Biographies & Memoirs. It also earned a BookFest Award Honorable Mention for Transformational Memoirs and was named a Distinguished Favorite Memoir in the NYC Big Book Awards.
At the heart of April's work is a simple idea: the experiences that shaped us live in rooms we've stopped walking into, and the beliefs we picked up there quietly run our lives. Through her Room Mapping framework, April helps audiences return to those rooms, trace a belief back to where it started, and see it clearly for the first time. It isn't about giving yourself permission to believe something better. It's about seeing accurately what was installed, by whom, and whether it was ever true.
April brings 11 years of clinical experience as a Certified Occupational Therapy Assistant in skilled nursing and rehabilitation, where she learned firsthand how people rebuild after life changes them. She is also Co-Founder and Chief Experience Officer of Be Brave Travel Academy, an accessible travel education program. Her talks are warm, story-driven, often funny, and leave audiences with one question to carry home: who are you brave enough to be? April is based on Long Island, New York.
Storytelling, and the connection that happens when we share our stories. We grow through our own experiences, but we connect by sharing them. My passion lies in watching someone connect with a story that changes how they see their own, and opens up a world inside of them they didn't know existed.
Recently, I was working with a patient who'd just lost his leg below the knee. He was standing at the parallel bars, gripping with both hands, balancing on one leg… and his pants fell down. He couldn't let go of the bar, so I pulled them up and tied his drawstring for him. Somewhere in the middle of that knot, I thought: how crazy is life. Because a drawstring is how I ended up in that room in the first place.
When I was 22, I got meningitis and lost some of my fingers. When I got home, my occupational therapist came into my room with a catalog of adaptive equipment, opened it on my lap, and told me there were things I wouldn't be able to do anymore. He was being "realistic." But what he was really handing me was a smaller life, with a very nice catalog to go with it.
So I fired him.
Then I sat on the edge of my bed with a pair of drawstring pants and tied it. Untied it. Tied it again. Over and over, until it was fast. Until it was easy.
Years later, I became an occupational therapy assistant, doing the same work as the man I fired. And I made myself one promise: no patient of mine would ever leave a session feeling the way I felt when he closed that book. I've kept that promise for almost 12 years.
When I tied my patient's drawstring, he didn't know my story. He didn't need to. What he needed was someone in that room who believed he'd be tying it himself soon.
At 22, I got meningitis and lost some of my fingers. The occupational therapist assigned to help me handed me a catalog of adaptive equipment and his belief that there were things I'd never be able to do again. I fired him that day, taught myself to tie a drawstring on the edge of my bed, and years later became an occupational therapy assistant myself. For almost 12 years, I've worked with patients learning to live in bodies that changed overnight.
What I noticed in all those years is that the hardest part of recovery usually isn't physical. It's the beliefs people carry about what they can or can't do, and how those beliefs were formed long before they found themselves working with me. I knew that because I'd been carrying my own, too.
So I started walking back into the rooms that shaped my life and my identity and writing about what I found. That process became The Room to Be Brave. The a-ha moment came when I started sharing those stories out loud. I watched people connect with my story and suddenly start seeing their own differently. That's when I knew this wasn't just a book. It was the work I was meant to do. Today I speak, write, and connect with people on one idea: sometimes the way forward begins with going back.
Sometimes the way forward begins with going back. In this #1 Amazon bestselling, award-winning memoir, April Day Garcia walks back into the rooms that shaped her and asks whether the beliefs she carried were ever true.
Buy NowRecently, I was working with a patient who'd just lost his leg below the knee. He was standing at the parallel bars, gripping with both hands, balancing on one leg… and his pants fell down. He couldn't let go of the bar, so I pulled them up and tied his drawstring for him. Somewhere in the middle of that knot, I thought: how crazy is life. Because a drawstring is how I ended up in that room in the first place.
When I was 22, I got meningitis and lost some of my fingers. When I got home, my occupational therapist came into my room with a catalog of adaptive equipment, opened it on my lap, and told me there were things I wouldn't be able to do anymore. He was being "realistic." But what he was really handing me was a smaller life, with a very nice catalog to go with it.
So I fired him.
Then I sat on the edge of my bed with a pair of drawstring pants and tied it. Untied it. Tied it again. Over and over, until it was fast. Until it was easy.
Years later, I became an occupational therapy assistant, doing the same work as the man I fired. And I made myself one promise: no patient of mine would ever leave a session feeling the way I felt when he closed that book. I've kept that promise for almost 12 years.
When I tied my patient's drawstring, he didn't know my story. He didn't need to. What he needed was someone in that room who believed he'd be tying it himself soon.
At 22, I got meningitis and lost some of my fingers. The occupational therapist assigned to help me handed me a catalog of adaptive equipment and his belief that there were things I'd never be able to do again. I fired him that day, taught myself to tie a drawstring on the edge of my bed, and years later became an occupational therapy assistant myself. For almost 12 years, I've worked with patients learning to live in bodies that changed overnight.
What I noticed in all those years is that the hardest part of recovery usually isn't physical. It's the beliefs people carry about what they can or can't do, and how those beliefs were formed long before they found themselves working with me. I knew that because I'd been carrying my own, too.
So I started walking back into the rooms that shaped my life and my identity and writing about what I found. That process became The Room to Be Brave. The a-ha moment came when I started sharing those stories out loud. I watched people connect with my story and suddenly start seeing their own differently. That's when I knew this wasn't just a book. It was the work I was meant to do. Today I speak, write, and connect with people on one idea: sometimes the way forward begins with going back.