Some stories are written to entertain. Gerald H. Simmons’s is written to survive. A New Beginning, his debut work of creative nonfiction, arrives September 14, 2026, and traces a life that moved through foster care, institutions, boarding school, and the military before it ever found solid ground. It is, at its core, a book about a man who refused to let a hard start decide the whole story.
Simmons was raised in Michigan, in a home marked by hardship and instability that shaped his earliest understanding of himself and the world around him. By the time he was seven years old, he had already entered the foster care system, and the years that followed carried him through group homes, therapeutic facilities, and eventually Starr Commonwealth, the youth organization that would leave one of the deepest marks on his life. Elizabeth Carey, President and CEO of Starr Commonwealth, writes the book’s foreword, calling Simmons living proof of the organization’s founding belief that every young person carries within them the potential for a remarkable life.
A ROAD THROUGH FOUR STATES AND THREE DECADES
The path Simmons describes in A New Beginning is not a straight one. It winds through Michigan, California, and Ohio before finally settling him in Georgia, and every stop along the way left its own mark, its own choices, and its own consequences. Rather than smoothing over the harder chapters, Simmons writes them plainly: the institutions, the years of searching for family and belonging, the mistakes made along the way. As Carey puts it in her foreword, he was not shaped by where he came from, but by everything he chose to become.
That honesty is what sets the book apart. A New Beginning does not present a tidy redemption arc. It presents a man in his late forties and early fifties finally arriving at the things he once feared he had missed entirely: love, marriage, children, and a family of his own. His path to that family did not follow the traditional timeline of growing up alongside a partner over decades. Instead, it came together almost all at once, a ready made family built out of trial, hardship, and hope, formed through marriage, fostering, and the deliberate decision to open his home to children who needed exactly what he once needed most.
“He was not shaped by where he came from, but by everything he chose to become.”
FAITH AS THE THROUGH LINE
Woven through every chapter of A New Beginning is a quiet but unshakable faith. Simmons has spoken about writing late at night in prison libraries and treatment center hallways alike, holding onto the belief that his story was not finished, even in seasons when the evidence pointed the other way. That belief carries into the book’s closing chapters, where marriage, children, and a settled home arrive not as a stroke of luck but as what Simmons describes as the fulfillment of a purpose he had been walking toward all along.
It is this blend of hard-won honesty and steady faith that gives the book its title. A new beginning, in Simmons’s telling, is not a single dramatic turn. It is a slow, deliberate rebuilding, one choice at a time, long after most people would have stopped believing one was still possible
WHY READERS WILL CONNECT
A New Beginning is written for readers who have faced their own hard seasons and are looking for a story that does not flinch from the truth of struggle while still making room for hope. It speaks directly to anyone who has ever wondered whether the life they hoped for was still within reach, and it offers something rarer than a happy ending: proof that healing is possible even when it arrives later, and differently, than expected.
The book also carries a message aimed squarely at young people navigating instability of their own. Simmons has said that one of his central hopes for the book is that it reaches readers who do not yet have a strong foundation or a clear sense of direction, and that it reminds them, plainly and without pretense, that hard work, self belief, and perseverance can carry a person further than their circumstances ever suggested they could go.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gerald H. Simmons was raised in Michigan, where his early years were shaped by time spent in foster homes, treatment facilities, and institutional care. Despite these challenges, he went on to serve in the military, build a successful career, and establish a loving family in Georgia. A New Beginning: A Journey Toward What Comes Next is his debut book, with his second work, The Other Side of the Mountain, currently in development. He resides in Alpharetta, Georgia.
Contact Media :
Contact Name: Gerald Simmons
Company Name: Gerald Simmons
Website URL: https://geraldsimmons.com/
Email: geraldhsimmons@tplusetc.com
Phone Number: 678-646-6701