As I pass the half-century point of my own life, I feel a deep responsibility to nurture these seeds so that those who come after us may inherit the worlds of peace, prosperity, hope, and possibility for which I have, in many different ways, worked throughout my life.

I began my career as a professor of cultural studies and writing in 1999, in the euphoria of the end of the Cold War and the excitement of the internet as the promise of a more free, just, and open society.  At Georgia Southern University, I built and directed the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, and used my research specialization in memory and trauma studies to develop a human rights and social action curriculum.

As the first quarter of the 21st century is coming to a close, the crises our world now faces are exponentially more critical than our rose-colored 20th-century vision predicted.  In a  quest to understand what had happened to the new era of global peace and prosperity for which we had hoped, I began research in the Western Balkans, where I spent 6 years working with former political prisoners from Albania’s cold-war totalitarian dictatorship and studying how dictatorships form.  In 2015, I co-founded the international nongovernmental organization OTTOnomy, for which I served as the Academic Director and Human Rights Coordinator.  With OTTOnomy, I developed projects that used the arts, culture, and public education to heal wounds of war and dictatorship.

In the two decades I spent bringing real-world problems into the classroom and education into the public sphere, I saw the many forms of individual, cultural, and collective trauma from which  people all over the world are suffering.  I also saw how resilient people are, how much we all want to create lives with hope and meaning, to live with dignity and a sense of purpose.  In our turn-of-the-century euphoria, the seeds of the crises we are now facing were already planted and growing, invisible to us.  In the same way, the seeds of regeneration that can bring us through these crises are already here, taking root, ready to sprout.  In my extensive work across continents and oceans, in academia, civil society, and government, I have seen these seeds in every place, with every group of people with whom I have worked.

It is our job to tend to these seeds, to nurture in ourselves and in the world the capacity for hope and healing that our futures require.  I nurture these seeds of our emerging future in 5 ways:

• Coaching
• Research and Writing
• Consulting
• Speaking
• Courses & Workshops

To prepare myself for tending to the seeds that depend on us to grow, I have trained as a Collective Trauma Facilitator with the Pocket Project and studied deep systems transformation through the Presencing Institute’s u-School for Transformation.  Additionally, I have trained as a Dialogue Facilitator with the Nansen Center for Peace and Dialogue and completed additional coursework on polyvagal theory, interpersonal neurobiology, treating trauma, Relational Life Therapy, and Internal Family Systems.

My Ph.D. is in English, with an emphasis on cultural studies and critical theory and a Certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Florida (1996); M.A. in English and American Literature, University of California San Diego (1987); B.A. in English, University of Hawaii, 1985.