I am a hands-on mentor who engages students and challenges each one under my care to look inward to test their creative abilities and discover their inner voice. I will stimulate the artist-student to broaden their scope and I am particularly interested in opening new horizons for those with whom I will engage. I use my education in poetry to develop critical insight into the creative writing process. My goal is to empower. I emphasize critical thinking, creativity of thought, collaboration, and communication. I feel that the student-peer-mentor relationship is extremely important to personal development, so I will craft opportunities for the students and instructor to interact through open dialogue. I've found that through the process of discourse students become open to different ideas, which enhance their own creative pursuitsI've taught in groups and with individuals and have received from each experience sincere gratitude to my students who simply try. My goal is to make my students-artists stop, think, and most importantly, enjoy the process. I urge them to embrace critical, creative, and independent thinking, to gather intellectual accountability by engaging deeply, to respect their fellows, and to analyze their personal reactions. If you know who you are in relation to someone else's ideas, then you're invested in your society; you care about how people do things.

I am a writer of poetry, and am, at this moment, writing a historical novel that is both Creative Nonfiction and