A teacher with decades of experience…

I taught for nine years in the Project Renaissance interdisciplinary humanities program at the University at Albany, State University of New York (2002 – 2011), and from 1988 – 1991 I taught as a graduate assistant at New York University, where in 1994 I earned my PhD in Comparative Literature, with a dissertation on ethnic autobiographies of the Americas.

All of my teaching is forward-looking: we study memoirs in order to better understand how to live our own lives and create a thriving future for ourselves and our communities. In my leadership, writing and public speaking classes, students research and learn how to advocate more effectively for the social and environmental justice issues they care about, with the goal of helping to create a better world for all.

I consult on strategic communications for environmental organizations, currently helping the Bioneers to launch their new year-round educational programming. I participate actively in various global online collaborations and classes, including:

• The Great Turning Experiment at Findhorn
• The Global Forum of the Presencing Institute at MIT
• The Thrutopia Masterclass with Manda Scott
• The Deep Transformation Network with Jeremy Lent
• The Eco-versities Alliance
• The r.3.0 Educational Blueprint Advisory Group
• The Pachamama Alliance community
• The Bard/OSUN Global Teach-in on Climate
• and more.

I have authored many academic articles and book chapters, and presented at many colleges, universities and national conferences, including:

• Princeton University
• Tufts University
• Mt. Holyoke College
• Modern Language Association
• National Women’s Studies Association
• African Studies Association
• Latin American Studies Association
• American Comparative Literature Association
• Association for the Study of Literature & the Environment
• International Leadership Association Conference
• Transformative Language Arts Network conference
• and many more.

Moving out of the ivory tower and into the community…

My memoir workshops, both in-person and online, are part of my longstanding commitment to share my education and training in arts activism with people of all ages and many walks of life.

In 2019, I offered purposeful memoir workshops at Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, the Bioneers Conference, the Transformative Language Arts Network Power of Words Conference, the WriteAngles Conference at Mt. Holyoke College, Bascom Lodge at Mt. Greylock State Reservation, the Writer’s Federation of Nova Scotia, and many more venues.

During the COVID period, I offered dozens of online writing workshops, and post-pandemic have begun to offer in-person workshops again, including at the Lunenburg School of the Arts (Nova Scotia) and Edith Wharton’s The Mount, in Lenox MA.
These workshops build on years of community organizing of arts events: I founded and directed a major annual conference in honor of International Women’s Day at Bard College/Simon’s Rock (2002 – 2014), which grew into the annual month-long Berkshire Festival of Women Writers, which I also founded and directed for seven years (2009 – 2016).

I organized hundreds of events in the Berkshire, Massachusetts region, featuring well-known writers such as Dani Shapiro, Ruth Reichl, Mary Pope Osborne, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Veronica Chambers, Alicia Partnoy, Margaret Randall, Deborah Miranda and many others, as well as emerging writers of all ages. I also founded and directed the writing-intensive Butterfly Leadership Program for teen girls (2014-2016), first as a summer program and then as a year-round extracurricular club.

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