Founder of Heartbeat Forward and a dedicated voice for children born with congenital heart disease. My work lives at the intersection of storytelling, advocacy, and the belief that visibility saves lives.
"I didn't come to this cause through personal pain. I came to it through something harder to explain. A moral weight I could not set down."
Adrian Adair · Founder, Heartbeat Forward
Published Works
Written directly to the child living with congenital heart disease, this book moves through sixteen chapters — Different, Marked, Small, Afraid, Tired, Brave, Seen, Enough — each one sitting with a feeling that CHD children know well and rarely hear named out loud.
It does not offer silver linings. It does not ask anyone to be brave. It sits beside the reader and tells them the truth about who they are. The scar. The fear nobody talks about. The heartbeat that kept going when the world held its breath.
For the waiting room. The hospital bag. The nightstand. The hard nights when everything feels like too much. A portion of proceeds benefits Heartbeat Forward.
Further Reading
Letters to the Waiting Room
For Every Family Touched by Congenital Heart Disease
Fourteen letters written directly to CHD families. To the parent in the waiting room. To the mother who signed the consent form. To the sibling who watched from the hallway. This book does not explain congenital heart disease. It sits beside the people living it and tells them they are not alone.
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The Quiet Majority
Why Congenital Heart Disease Deserves to Be Seen
Congenital heart disease is the most common birth defect in the world, yet most people have never heard of it. This book makes the case for visibility, tracing why CHD has remained in the shadows, what that silence costs families, and why the time to change it is now.
Order on Amazon →The Author
Author, Advocate & Founder of Heartbeat Forward
Adrian Adair is the founder of Heartbeat Forward, a federally recognized 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to CHD awareness, delivering care packages to children in cardiac units, and working toward funding heart surgeries for children in need.
He is the author of three books under his Teneritas Press imprint, host of the podcast Small Hearts, Loud Voices, and publisher of the Substack What the Colors Sing. His long-term vision is for Heartbeat Forward and CHD advocacy to be inseparable from his public identity, modeled on the belief that visibility saves lives.