Bio

I am a poet, folklorist, and community arts consultant.  I am the author of two books of poetry (Razor Wire received the Austin Book Award in 1986) and a book of Quechua Inca translations, Return of the Inca (1986).  My degrees include an M.A. in anthropology with specialization in folklore from the University of Texas. I conducted Quechua folklore research for a year (1989/90) in Peru with a Fulbright Research grant and worked in bi-national centers and universities in Colombia with an Academic Specialist Grant from the US Information Agency (1991).

My primary work since the late ’70s was as a resident writer, program administrator, and arts consultant for local, state, federal, and foreign agencies in the development of arts programs for community settings.  Over the past four decades, I have worked with schools, arts organizations, housing authorities, adult and juvenile justice institutions, faith-based organizations, healthcare venues, and municipal governments in this endeavor. In 1996, I authored Artists in The Community:  Training Artists to Work in Alternative Settings (1996), and documented Agents for Social Change:  Summary Report of the 4th International Congress of Educating Cities (1998)forAmericans for the Arts. 

In the area of arts-in-corrections, I have worked directly with programs in England, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Peru, and in more than 25 states in the U.S.

I began my corrections work as a Poet-in-the Schools for the Windham School System of the Texas Department of Corrections from 1981 to 1984.  I directed literacy and literature at 16 prisons and provided some dance, music, and visual arts programming.  I co-edited an anthology of inmate writing entitled Writer’s Block.  The workshops I taught were the subject of the award-winning film, Lions, Parakeets and Other Prisoners (CINE Golden Eagle, Gold at the Houston International Film Festival, 1984).

From 1999 to 2002, I was Technical Assistance Provider to a federal initiative Arts Programs for Young Offenders in Detention and Corrections, of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP). In 2002, I published Arts Programs for Juvenile Offenders in Detention and Corrections: A Guide to Promising Practices for OJJDP and the Arts Endowment. From 2002 to 2004, I served as a consultant to Creative Communities, another federal initiative partnering with the National Guild for Community Schools for the Arts, the Arts Endowment, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.  This program developed community arts centers within public housing developments in 20 U.S. cities. 

Currently, I serve as President of the Southwest Correctional Arts Network (SCAN) which was founded in 1994. Through an Arts Endowment grant in 2012, SCAN compiled the first annotated bibliography of all evidence-based research into U.S. correctional arts programs, Prison Arts Resource Project (PARP). PARP is a living document and is continually updated as new studies become available.

My most recent book is Arts in Corrections: Thirty Years of Annotated Publications which is an anthology of selected work from 1981 to 2014 published by Routledge.