Lazarre Simckes

"A man is not his blemish!" from Seven Days of Mourning. Don't hold my Harvard degrees against me (B.A. and Ph.D.) or my Stanford degree (M.A.) What I value most in my career were my years as community-based family therapist in Rhode Island, and prison sex offender therapist in a Massachusetts rehabilitation program. What a privilege to help others in extreme need. Teaching at colleges has been great, but then again I preferred conducting televised interactive writing workshops for high school and middle school students across the country for four years. Most satisfying was the interactive, cross-cultural writing workshop ("Celebrating Differences") I conducted for Israeli Arab and Jewish high school students and their counterparts in Massachusetts, who shared their life experiences via satellite. Now I need Arab and Israeli partners (writers as teachers) to help modify the educational landscape of the Mideast, encouraging mutual validation and empathy through story telling in the company of each other.
Writing, teaching, therapy, translations from the Hebrew, now comes acting in and directing my own plays. Finally I'm the ham in my own sandwich.