Writer, minister, and storyteller Danté Stewart knows what it means to never look away. The most important act a writer can do is to go close — to stay in the room, sit at the table, to listen and attune to our humanity —  and report back with enough love and enough honesty that the reader cannot look away and cannot leave unchanged. In this talk, he traces the specific creative, spiritual, and journalistic choices behind his most powerful work: his book What A Broken Heart Can Do, his public writing on social media, his time reporting on the aftermath of a mass shooting Uvalde, Texas, the life of a 9/11 victim New York City, the complexities of rural black life in South Carolina, and a mysterious death in Ocean Springs, MS. He argues that going where it hurts isn’t about objectivity, it is about love. As a storyteller, he has learned heartbreak is not an interruption of your life. It is the material your life is made from. The question is not how to recover from it but what you make while you’re still inside it.