Poetry Therapy And Social Justice

The Poetry Therapy Society of India in alliance Palabra Counseling & Training Center, LLC ,USA bring to you a 2 day comprehensive interactive workshop; including lecture and experiential activities to promote understanding and familiarity with the use of literature to generate healing and promote personal growth and development.

Bibliotherapy and poetry therapy facilitators and providers focus on using literature to help people deal with personal, interpersonal and community chal­lenges. Biblio/poetry therapy can be used in prisons, support groups, schools, in-patient wards and hospitals etc.

Who should attend

This training is geared toward healers, educators and other healthcare professionals who value the applications of words and language. This includes psychologists, social workers, counselors, marriage and family therapists, teachers, librarians, information specialists, nurses, physicians occupational and recreational therapists and spiritual guides and students. And social change activists, grassroots organisers, advocates and allies, and notably poets, journalists, authors, journalists, or writers by profession or passion or both, who are interested in the potential of literature to create wellbeing.

Workshop Structure

1. Setting the tone/warm-up
2. Introduction of the literature
3. Discussion and personal engagement with the poem
4. Exploration and self-application of literature through discussion
5. Writing Activities for self-exploration and self-application
6. Sharing of writing
7. Closure

Workshop schedule

Day One: Biblio/Poetry Therapy: History, Development, Process, Interventions and Practice
Day Two: Poetry & Social Justice

Participants will partake in writing and discussions, in which a poem will serve as a springboard to inquiry and understanding, to growth and healing. Poetry will be the vehicle to personal insight. Poems will be used to advance the conversation and personal reflections of the participants’ engagement with issues of social justice.

About your facilitators

Dr. Marianela Medrano is a Dominican writer and psychotherapist. In her work she uses literature as a healing tool. Her areas of interest and practice include Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Mindfulness and Integral Psychotherapy. Dr. Medrano has been a faculty mentor for the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, now Sophia University, in Palo Alto, California, and a visiting scholar at Goddard College, in Vermont. Her work as a poetry therapist was recognized with an outstanding award from the National Association for Poetry Therapy. in 2007. She is also a mentor/supervisor for the International Federation of Biblio/Poetry Therapy.

Dr Ralph Nazareth will share his experience working with inmates in maximum security prisons. Dr. Nazareth is President of Grace Works International, a non-profit charitable foundation. He was a professor of English at Nassau Community College until he retired in 2015.In the late 60’s he worked as a volunteer in the villages around Nasik, Maharashtra, India. For the last ten years he has taught in the Rising Hope program at maximum security prisons in New York. He has been involved in many non-profit organizations in Stamford, CT, including St. Luke’s Life Works and Poem Alley, a creative arts outreach arm of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Stamford. Nazareth has participated in poetry festivals in India, the Middle East, and in Latin America. His poetry and prose have appeared in books, magazines, and journals in the US and abroad, including most recently in the award-winning collection Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry and Multilingual Anthology: The Americas Poetry Festival of New York 2014. His collection of poems Ferrying Secrets was published in 2005 in Hyderabad, India and Glass: Selected Poems will be released by El Quirófano Ediciones in Ecuador in the fall of 2015.

Links to their work and accreditations:

1.Dr. Medrano’s blog for the American Counseling Association ACA: https://www.counseling.org/news/aca-blogs/aca-member-blogs/aca-member-bloggers/marianela-medrano
2. Dr. Medrano’s blog for the Natural Nutmeg Magazine: https://naturalnutmeg.com/promoting-healing-and-wellbeing-one-poem-at-a-time/
Her TedTalk at Urseline College: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pQeBYd2oJk
3. National Association for Poetry Therapy : (https://poetrytherapy.org)
4. #IFBPT: https://ifbpt.org/obtaining-a-credential/about-mentorsupervisors

Bookings and registration

Write to contactus@tatva.center
Spaces are limited and its first-come-first-served.