My Story

I approached a creativity coach two years ago after feeling like I’d run out of options as an artist. Poetry was at the absolute, unshakeable center of my life. Making poems felt more or less like a smooth, low-stakes and fun process, but I was struggling with not having a book of poetry published after five years of submitting mine to contests and publishers. It was just the Submittable page and me in a perpetual face-off.  

My work with the wonderful coach Corinna Burns helped me find the agency to change my life. I started to realize that I was stuck because there was a contradiction between what I said I wanted and what I believed about myself. For example, two sessions into my work with her, I confessed out loud, for the first time, that I missed performing on a stage: it dawned on me then and there that I didn’t want poetry to be the only art in my life. I had more to offer. At the same time, saying these words out loud hit my gut hard, because I believed, at rock bottom, that who I was in my physical body and voice wasn’t worth sharing. I started to realize that this contradiction was benefitting me, which made it that much harder to dissolve: writing poetry was in some way the safe artistic option because it meant keeping a real part of myself off-stage. My physical body and physical voice weren’t called into question as a poet who only wrote poems to be encountered by strangers reading my work in books and magazines and on websites. By the end of my ten-session package with her, I’d made the decision to keep submitting my poetry collection, yes, but also to return to performing, something I hadn’t done since I was a musical theater kid in high school.

Two years after starting my work with a coach, I have three full-length collections of poetry out in the world and a growing career in performing professionally as an actor and singer.

I’ve now decided to start helping others find their own ease in making art.

What prepares me to do this work? Good question.

I have seven years of experience teaching, consulting, tutoring, and helping people understand the psychology of creativity. I have thousands of hours under my belt as a writing consultant at schools like Columbia University and Baruch College, and I have also recently been named the in-house writing consultant for the graduate schools of the American Museum of Natural History. I have also been teaching courses on writing and the psychology of creativity for the past three years at NYU, where I use cutting edge research on the social psychology of motivation, self-concept, and creativity to help students become confident contributors to academic communities. I also read and give feedback support for MFA students at Columbia’s School of the Arts, helping them transition into the path of professional artistry. In addition, I am currently starting a creativity renewal service with a psychotherapist with thirty years of experience; together, we are designing a bootcamp for people feeling blocked or burned out in their creative lives, in and out of workplace settings. And of course, I also have my own experience as a working artist in multiple disciplines.

Whether I am in a classroom, a one-to-one session in a writing center, or grabbing a coffee with a client in a cafe, I love to listen to people describe their process in making their work come to life. And I love to ask the sorts of questions that help people turn on the lightbulbs in their own imaginations.

If you are an artist looking to better your experience of your artistic process, reach out to me. Tell me about what you are aiming to make next and what sort of support you are looking for. We’ll go from there.