The indie publishing world was not where Sarah Ward expected her life and career would take her, but it’s where she’s supposed to be.

Now as an author and publisher, Ward is lending her public health training to advocate for reading programs in Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICU) and family literacy.

Sarah was working as a dental hygienist in Birmingham, Alabama, when she got pregnant with her twin daughters.

Toward the end of her second trimester, Sarah’s family and friends threw her a baby shower. In lieu of cards, Sarah and her husband asked that guests help build their daughters’ library by bringing books.

A few days later, Sarah was in the hospital delivering her twin daughters at 28 weeks. Sarah and her husband would soon take up residence for 2 ½ months within University of Alabama at Birmingham’s regional Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Sarah and her husband felt totally unprepared and out of their element.

“I had thought, I might spend a couple of weeks in the NICU if they came a little early. But no one expects them to come three months early,” said Sarah.

That first day in the NICU, Sarah remembers how she and her husband sat in shock. She asked her husband to go pick up some things from home for the night ahead. When he returned, his arms were full of books selected from the large collection friends and family had helped build for their girls.

“That first night, he started reading to them,” she said.

Sarah and her husband learned from the attending nurses and their own research that reading to newborns in the NICU improves neurological development, soothes and reduces stress, while strengthening bonds between babies and parents, something “which is very difficult to do when your baby is in a box.”

So, every day, the Wards read to their daughters in the NICU. Years later, when the birth of her son found them in the NICU once again, Sarah and her husband read to him during his week-long stay.

The Power Of Storytelling

After their experience, the Wards discussed how they could give back to the people who had helped them through their time in the NICU. Making a gift to help build the hospital’s NICU reading library seemed like a good start.

The Wards hoped to donate a NICU-themed children’s book, but they couldn’t find one. Sarah’s husband suggested that maybe they should write their own. The idea seemed crazy to Sarah at first.

“But I had actually written this poem,” she said. “I don’t know if it was just postpartum therapy or what, because I don’t sit around writing poetry. I had written it after our girls came home, and then stuck it in my nightstand and forgot about it for a couple of years.”

She pulled it out and handed it over to him to read.

“He’s like, ‘This is really good. We should turn it into a book.’ That’s how we stumbled into publishing it,” she said.

Sarah was “clueless” about where to begin, but she was determined to tell their story in the hopes that it could help other parents.

“No one talks about [their NICU experiences]. You don’t get those precious pictures of leaving the hospital with your baby,” she said. “Instead, it’s ‘My baby didn’t come home. I went home empty-handed. Now I’m sad because I have to keep going back to the hospital to visit them.’ It’s a roller coaster of emotions, for sure.”

During her son’s stint at the NICU, Sarah struggled to help her young daughters understand what was happening.

“‘You can’t visit your baby brother. He’s in a box with a bunch of tubes around him.’ Trying to communicate with them was so hard,” she said. “The book became a way for me to teach them what they went through and what their brother went through in the NICU.”

Sarah hired an illustrator and a book designer to help bring together her words and vision into a final product—as well as design a logo for her new business, Little Ward Books.

On November 17, 2021, Sarah’s book, Our NICU Journey, became a reality.

Author To Advocate

To help promote the book, Sarah reached out to organizations that had helped her own family through their NICU journeys, including Beads of Courage, a national non-profit organization that helps children cope with serious illness and treatment challenges by awarding a colorful bead for each milestone of their treatment journey.

Each bead represents a single step in a child’s medical journey —an Xray, a therapy session or a needle poke. A string of these beads features prominently in Sarah’s book.

“When my girls left the hospital, they each had this strand of beads. Even now they look at it and they say, ‘Oh, what was that bead for?’ And I say, ‘That’s for when you had to have an eye exam or that was for when you had to get a blood transfusion.’ Each bead just reminds them of how strong and courageous that they were.”

Sarah and Little Ward Books also launched the “Reading through the NICU” program in 2022, focused on helping hospitals create their own reading programs aimed at providing support and comfort to NICU patients and their families.