Stronger.

Music was the first dream.

Long before courtrooms, the U.S. Supreme Court, advocacy, or speaking, there was music.

Coles built her first career as a singer-songwriter, releasing nine albums and spending years touring the country from the driver’s seat of a truck and camper. Colorado was home base. Music was the plan.

Then stalking changed everything.

After six years of escalating messages and threats, the freedom required to tour, perform, and tell strangers where she would be next no longer felt possible. Eventually, Coles walked away from the career she had spent years building.

Then she found her way back.

It didn’t happen all at once.

After years of trauma therapy, Coles began learning how to work with panic and the effects of trauma—things she hadn’t even known existed before stalking changed the way her body experienced safety.

She started small.

A song in a room that felt manageable. Then a small stage. Then a bigger one.

Each time, she practiced staying present through the fear long enough to rediscover the joy on the other side of it. Slowly, the stages got bigger. The audiences did too.

Today, Coles is performing again and weaving original music into her speaking around the country. And she’s still working toward one stage that means more than most: performing again in Colorado, where her music career began.

Not because she needs to recreate the life she had before.

Because getting to choose where she stands now is part of what came next.

The music sounds different now.

So does she.

The songs Coles writes and performs today explore what happens after disruption: fear and agency, loss and resilience, what we carry forward, and what we choose to leave behind.

Music has also become an integral part of her speaking. Original songs are woven directly into her presentations—not as a performance break, but as another way into the story and the ideas words alone can’t always reach.

See Coles speak →