TEDx Organizers

Writing, World Building, Philosophy

Discovery and Peace through Authentic Stories Nuerodiversity!

That positive thinking can overcome the most severe maladies and mindfulness can foster more compassionate decisions and richer experiences are some of the most inspiring facets of the human mind.

Connecting school communities and stakeholders. Enrichment and learning outside the normal classroom. Interdisciplinary approach to learning through STEM/STEAM education.

Theatre, music, Kung Fu, and creativity.

Like many Americans, I believe in the power of people working together for social justice. I began my career volunteering in an all-male maximum security prison and for the past eleven years have taught at a Title 1, New York State public school, working tirelessly to help adolescents and educators see themselves as change makers.

education. It defines who I am and how I live.

Bringing People Alive, Encouraging Others to Follow their Passions Consciousness & "Quantum Realities" The Art & Science of Mathematics in the Universe Comedy: Theory, Writing, & Performing Music

I'm passionate about championing the underdog. I like to empower those who feel the least powerful and help them understand that they don't know their own strength. After all, no one is coming to save us. We must understand that the power we need is power we already have.

I am obsessed with what happens inside the human mind when it finally gets out of its own way. Meta-cognition is the throughline of everything I do. Not just what we think, but how we think, what patterns we default to, what assumptions we carry without examining them. When I teach it, I am not teaching people to think harder. I am teaching them to think differently about their own thinking. That shift, held long enough, changes people. Curiosity is not a personality trait. It is a skill. Organizations without it calcify. Leaders without it stop growing and start defending. Genuine curiosity requires the courage to not know, to sit with uncertainty long enough for something new to emerge. That is countercultural work in a world that rewards certainty and speed. It is also some of the most important work I know how to do. Literacy is where my passion becomes personal. When I founded 916 Ink, I believed every young person had a story worth telling. What I discovered was that giving someone the tools to tell their story produces not just a book but a person who understands their inner life has value. I have watched that transformation more than 8,000 times, in kids who never imagined themselves as authors and in incarcerated people who wrote their way back to themselves one sentence at a time. I do not believe in throwaway people. My work inside California’s correctional system is among the most formative of my career. The capacity for reflection and genuine transformation does not disappear inside a cell. It waits. It needs a prompt, a pen, seven minutes, and someone who believes it is still there. Prison reimagination is not a policy conversation for me. It is a deeply human one. Birds are descendants of dinosaurs who survived a mass extinction by evolving, not by being the biggest or most powerful, but by developing new capacities for a world that had changed. I think about this constantly. Milo, my 11-year-old Eclectus parrot, is my daily reminder that wisdom does not always arrive in the forms we expect. The hero line of my work is Together We Fly. It is not a tagline. It is a philosophy. What is possible when we stop settling for what has always been? That question animates everything I do. The most powerful tools are not the newest ones. They are the human ones, hiding in plain sight, waiting to be picked up again.