This website use cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website
Poetry as a Healing Art
Poetry has always been a place where we tend our wounds and find our way home to ourselves.
In this three-part series, presenters Deborah Eve Grayson, John Fox, and Ana Ljubinkovic invite Stafford Challenge members and the wider public to explore how creativity can support wellness in body, heart, and spirit.
The series is free and open to all, though registration is required. Each presentation has its own registration link, so please sign up for every session that calls to you.
We are here to nurture your growth as a poet, and we would love to see you there.
Tuesday, October 20, 5pm PT
Deborah Eve Grayson
Poetry as Prescription: How Poetry Heals the Hurts, Instills Hope, and Inspires Creativity
This will be a highly interactive presentation on experiencing how poetry works as a healing modality for common universal themes like grief and loss, life span changes like aging, personal and world conflicts, celebrations, resilience, and renewal. We will be inspired and prompted to write, reflect and marvel at the power of poetry to combat pain and create space for enlightenment and change. Contemporary poets and music will be utilized..
Deborah Eve Grayson, PhD, LMHC, PTR, is a Clinical Sexologist, Licensed Mental Health Counselor, Registered Poetry Therapist and Expressive Arts Specialist, photographer and author. A pioneer in the Poetry Therapy movement, she received The National Association for Poetry Therapy (NAPT) Pioneer Award, in Chicago in 2026, and was also the keynote speaker for NAPT in 2025, (and 2004). Deborah co-authored “Parents and Other Strangers: A Creative Guide to Better Relationships (1987), written with her mentor, Ann White. which was the first Poetry Therapy book to use case studies, poems and prompts taken from 20 years of combined practice to facilitate change. She has enjoyed a solo private practice for over 40 years and is also an Adjunct Professor at Lynn University in the College of Arts and Sciences. She enjoys anything that involves the arts, human kindness, animals (especially sloths, ring-tailed lemurs, and otters) being in nis nature and laughing. She is thrilled to have joined The Stafford Challenge family where she has been writing a combination of masterpieces for the moment and mismatched musings on other days.
Thursday, November 19, 5pm PT
John Fox
Poetic Medicine as a Personal Practice
Being a human in this world, there is no shortage of difficulties or crises. There are griefs and there are joys. To rediscover personal meaning through poetry—and in the process cultivate truth-telling, strength, resilience, and self-compassion—is a beautiful gift to ourselves. A gift that leads us into our lives, rather than away from them.
In this presentation, we’ll explore how Poetic Medicine offers presence instead of productivity, stillness instead of scrolling, deep listening instead of overwhelm, and offers a way back to your own intuitive voice.
John Fox, Practitioner of Poetic Medicine, is a poet, educator and author. His books include Finding What You Didn’t Lose: Expressing Your Truth and Creativity through Poem-Making (1995) and Poetic Medicine: The Healing Art of Poem-Making (1997). His work is featured in the PBS documentary, Healing Words: Poetry and Medicine. He contributed “Healing the Within” to The Healing Environment published by the Royal College of Physicians in the United Kingdom in 2003.
He is the founder and Executive Director of The Institute for Poetic Medicine (2005), a nonprofit that brings poetry-as-healer workshops and Poetic Medicine training to people around the world including those society often considers as living at the margins. John lives in Mountain View, California. You can find out more about his work and The Institute for Poetic Medicine at www.poeticmedicine.org
Wednesday, December 16, 5pm PT
Dr. Ana Ljubinkovic
Dr. Ana Ljubinkovic is an Associate Professor of Sociology at California State University, Stanislaus, and an external academic examiner for the MA in Refugee Care at the University of Essex, UK. Her research interests focus on trauma, collective violence, refugeehood, and the role of poetry in promoting psychological healing. Ana has previously taught at MA programs in Human Rights (UK), MA in Refugee Care (UK) and MA in Peace Education (Italy).
Her work has been published in the Journal of Poetry Therapy and includes the articles Poetry as ‘self-therapy’ in intractable conflict settings, Healing dimensions of Somali poetry in response to military humanitarian intervention, and Therapeutic role of Somali humor in digesting military humanitarian intervention. Her recent publication, Bards of Dadaab: Oral poetry and psychological healing among Somali refugees in Kenya, explores the therapeutic role of Somali oral verse in coping with protracted exile. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Poetry Therapy and has conducted workshops at National Association for Poetry Therapy (NAPT) conferences in 2026, 2025 and 2024.