Katie Rizzo holds two master’s degrees in science from Yale and the University of Colorado School of Medicine and has spent more than 15 years teaching high school AP Biology and Anatomy.
She never thought of herself as a writer. That changed on September 17, 2024, when she lost her firstborn son to substance use disorder.
Before her son died, she had never written poetry, but suddenly she had no other language. She began writing as a way to reach him, to somehow connect across that invisible divide.
She is still early in this journey, not even two years in, but she is walking it with remarkable honesty and courage.
She is sharing her story for a reason. She knows there are other parents living this same reality, grieving a child lost to something the world often stigmatizes and not always feeling there is space to mourn openly. She wants them to know they are not alone.
In this episode of Grieving Out Loud, she shares her son’s story, what she wants others to understand about loving someone struggling with addiction, and how she is finding healing by telling the truth instead of hiding it.
Read more of Katie’s writing on her website here.
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MEET THE GUEST
Katie Rizzo
Katie Rizzo is a fiction writer and former high school science teacher whose short stories have appeared in literary journals and anthologies, with juried placements at the Aspen Words Conference in 2023 and 2025. She holds a master’s degree from Yale University and completed graduate work at the University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine. When she lost her firstborn son to substance use disorder in September 2024, she found herself reaching for a language she had never used before, and began writing poetry as a way to grieve honestly in a world that does not always make space for that kind of loss.
