Keynote speaker · Author · Award-winning poet
Fear speaks.We can learn how to answer.
Erika X. Driscoll shares lessons learned from lived experience: what fear can sound like, how it can shape our choices, and what she has learned by continuing to step forward and speak in public.
Drawing from Navy service, professional leadership, poetry, memoir, and the stage, she offers stories, lessons learned, and practical questions for people considering how fear shapes their own lives.
Fear management is a skill.
Erika shares what lived experience has taught her about practicing it.
On the stage
Stories that leave room to think.
Erika’s presentations meet people in the complicated middle—where certainty is rare, growth is still possible, and a good question can open an unexpected door.
The Universe Spoke
A literary keynote about perfection, worth, and the moments when fear deserves examination rather than automatic obedience.
Grow Your Garden
A practical conversation about cultivating a business while employed, reclaiming time, and building greater economic agency.
Transgender Leadership
A lived-experience perspective on recognizing the leadership qualities people already carry and using them with authenticity and care.
On the page
Here We Go
A literary memoir about living with fear, identity, self-acceptance, leadership, and the difficult art of being seen.
Through lived experience, Here We Go asks how much authority fear should have—and what can change when we examine its predictions, recognize our worth, and leave room to keep growing.
Meet the bookNot a formula. Not all the answers. An invitation to ask what might happen if we reexamine our old programming.
The formal presentation matters. So does what becomes possible after the microphone is turned off.
At the conference
A keynote—and room for a real conversation.
Erika brings the craft and emotional weight of a writer to the stage. When the event and schedule allow, she also welcomes the less formal parts of gathering: audience Q&A, panel conversations, readings, and the thoughtful exchanges that happen afterward.
Those moments are not a promise of unlimited availability. They are part of a belief that meaningful ideas deserve somewhere to go once the applause ends.
Erika’s work moves between the spoken and written word.
Poetry & selected works
Language for the things we are still learning to name.
Explore poetry about creation and belonging, moral conviction and renewal, with each selection linked back to its original home.