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Hard Hits & Other Life Lessons from Roller Derby
Paperback
AthletesSelf-HelpWomen's Studies
Publisher Price: $14.99
Publisher: LIV Fearless Press
Published: Oct 1 2026
Pages: 260
Weight: 0.67
Height: 0.59 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
A minister walks into a roller derby practice and skates into a new chapter of her life, and brings you along.
In her late 30s and in a new town trying to make friends, Dawn strapped on roller skates and discovered that a track full of women hitting each other had more to teach her about courage, community, and staying upright than most of what she'd learned in seminary. She took the name Liv Fearless. She was not, at first, fearless. That was rather the point.
Hard Hits & Other Life Lessons from Roller Derby is a memoir about our bodies as places where the sacred happens: bruised, terrified, laughing, and refusing to quit. It's about falling down in front of people and getting back up in front of them, too. It's about humility and vision and burnout and beauty and bearing witness; the stuff nobody warned her the track would surface.
Designed to be read in order, the chapters build with each pairing a story from the track with a reflection and a challenge, so that following Dawn's journey becomes a way of finding your own. You don't need to know a jammer from a pivot. You only need to have wanted, at some point, to be braver than you were.
Dawn S. Cooley (aka Liv Fearless) is a Unitarian Universalist minister and writer.
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