It was a cold March day in 2012 when April was diagnosed with the Stage IIIc HER2+ breast cancer that she found while breastfeeding her daughter. She was 35-years-old. Four years later, while struggling to “go back to normal” and find other women in similar circumstances, April launched Wildfire Magazine in the spare bedroom of her home (where she still works today!). Although she had a background in journalism and had used writing to process the traumas and events of her life, magazine publishing was never a world in which she expected to find herself.
But more than nine years and 50 issues in, she hasn’t looked back!
April now enjoys not only publishing the stories of those “too young for breast cancer,” she also finds pleasure in helping others heal through learning the life-changing transformation to be experienced from writing and sharing their stories aloud. She also enjoys supporting other survivors-turned-entrepreneurs working to make the breast cancer landscape better for those that will be diagnosed next.
April lives with her family and precocious border collie mix on the coast of central California.