Kalise White: From Justice-Impacted to Author and Trauma Advocate

A Childhood Spent Bouncing Between Two Worlds

Kalise White never had a stable home growing up. Raised mostly by her grandparents after her mother, young and, in Kalise’s words, “in the streets”, couldn’t provide a steady roof, she spent her childhood moving back and forth, grandparents’ house to her mother’s apartment in a housing complex. Her brother and sister lived with her mother. She mostly didn’t.

“My whole life was like in and out, in and out,” she told host Brent Cassity on Nightmare Success In and Out. “Like, oh, now what’s about to happen now? I’m back here again.”

The instability felt singular. Friends seemed to know where they’d be sleeping next week, but Kalise was always bracing for the next disruption. “It seemed like everybody else was where they was going to be,” she said, “and then my world was, I’m here, I’m there, I’m back over here, I’m back over there.”

Her grandparents had raised children of the own well and loved her fully, but they’d grown older and wanted rest. Kalise remembers overhearing the conversation she dreaded most: her grandfather explaining that they wanted to travel, that they needed a break, that it was time for her to go back home to her mother and siblings. “Every time I would hear that conversation, it left me trying to put a plan together,” she said. “Basically, I felt like a burden.”

Running at 13

The first time Kalise ran away, she was 13 years old. She was staying at her mother’s apartment and something in the home made her deeply uncomfortable, her mother’s boyfriend in particular. “Things were happening in the home that I didn’t agree with,” she said. “I didn’t like my mother’s boyfriend at the time. None of us liked him.”

She called her grandparents repeatedly, asking them to come get her. When they didn’t move fast enough, she bolted to a friend’s house and stayed for two weeks. Her mother eventually tracked her down and sent her back. But the cycle, flee, get retrieved, return, kept repeating until it didn’t. The last time she went back to her mother’s house, she ran and never came back. She was still 13.

What followed was a teenage stretch spent in pure survival mode, with no room left for the ambitions she’d carried as a younger kid. “When I was a little kid in elementary, I always was like, I’mma be a lawyer. I’mma have three kids. I’mma be married,” she said. By high school, though, that vision had dissolved entirely. “I completely lost sight of my dream. Because at this point, I was trying to figure out how I was not going to be a burden to my grandparents and how I didn’t want to go to my mother’s house.”

When Cassity asked whether watching her mother’s lifestyle shaped how she planned to live her own life, Kalise’s answer was immediate and unfiltered: “At the time, I think I was just in survival mode. I didn’t even think that far. All I knew is just that I wanted out of there.”

Loss, Labels, and the Weight of Silence

Kalise’s adult years brought the kind of compounded loss that doesn’t arrive with warning. Her brother, the sibling she described as her closest, died. His death pushed her and her sister together in grief. “It’s just me and her now,” she said quietly.

Her path also led her to the criminal justice system, earning her the label she now carries openly: justice-impacted. She doesn’t hide from the word. Incarceration and its aftermath, the shame, the judgment, the silence that circumstances impose, all of it eventually became the raw material for her writing.

She wrote two books. The first, You Left Me, God Blessed Me, takes on abandonment, faith, and the long road from feeling discarded to feeling chosen. The second, No Longer Silenced, names the core wound most directly: the silence that trauma demands and the cost of keeping it.

Turning Pain Into a Platform

Today Kalise White works as a trauma advocate, drawing on her own story to create what she calls a safe space for others. The goal isn’t performance or inspiration for its own sake. Practical. She believes people can’t heal what they cannot say out loud.

“When you feel safe, you can heal,” she told Cassity. “I don’t think none of us is completely 100% ever going to be 100% healed, but I believe you can get close. And that’s my goal.”

She’s clear-eyed about what silence does to people who are forced to carry things alone. “When you got to keep a lot of stuff buried, you creating a monster,” she said. The books, the advocacy work, the willingness to speak publicly about incarceration, abandonment, and trauma, all of it is a direct response to that truth.

The girl who ran away at 13 because no one came fast enough now spends her time making sure other people don’t feel that same alone. “I felt abandoned,” she said. “I wanted love. So when I’m talking and I’m helping people get to a safe place where they’re opening up and talking about it, it helps shape your future and who you are.”

She no longer sees her past as something to survive. She sees it as the reason she’s useful.