About Sharon Bray Sharon was my student for a semester at Goddard College, where she studied Transformative Language Arts. She is an astonishing writer, facilitator, and innovator in the field of TLA, and her business, Wellspring Writers, has great impact on all her students. Her excellent books on writing through illness are superb and used by many of my students as well as myself in facilitating workshops for people living with cancer and other serious illness. Sharon is a true visionary, a marvelously moving and insightful writer, and a mentor-facilitator.
--Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Ph.D., Founder, Transformative Language Arts Program, Goddard College Dr. Bray was an excellent instructor and coach. Right from the start, [she] created a beautiful and safe environment in which complete stranges could share intimate stories of personal trauma ...stories never shared with anyone else.
--UCLA extension Writer's Program student
Author, Educator and practitioner in therapeutic writing, Sharon Bray is best known for her innovative work in leading expressive writing groups for men and women with cancer and teaching and mentoring helping professionals in the use of expressive writing for those who have suffered pain, loss or trauma.
Her first book, This Way to Canada, was written for children while she was a young mother living in Nova Scotia. Her most recent books, A Healing Journey: Writing Together Through Cancer (Amherst Writers Press, 2004) and When Words Heal: Writing Through Cancer (Frog Books, 2006) document Sharon's use of expressive writing with cancer patients. She has also written and published non-fiction, poetry, and memoir as well as a number of professional articles. Her work has appeared in Moxie Magazine, Looking Back: Stories of our Mothers and Fathers in Retrospect; The Santa Clara Weekly; Women's Forum; The San Jose Business Journal; Goddard College's Semester Magazine, The Transformative Language Arts Reader, Coping with Cancer Magazine, and The Storyteller & Listener Online, among others. Most recently, she was co-editor with Patricia Fobair, LCSW, of Learning to Live Again, an anthology of writing by cancer patients, published by the Stanford University School of Medicine (2007). Sharon is featured on the DVD, Writing Alone and With Others, the teaching accompaniment to Pat Schneider's 2003 book by the same title, discussing her writing groups with cancer patients. She is currently at work on a novel.
Sharon currently teaches for the UCLA extension Writer's Program and CEU courses on writing and healing for helping professionals at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley. Her therapeutic writing groups are offered at at Stanford Cancer Center in Palo Alto, CA as well as Scripps Green, Moores UCSD andSharp Memorial Cancer Centers in San Diego. She offers a series of creative writing workshops privately and for the Medical Humanities program at Stanford Medical School.
Sharon was an adjunct faculty member in the Counseling Psychology Department at Santa Clara University from 1997 - 2003 and counseled many adults and students during periods of life transition, job loss and change. As she began to focus more on the power of writing to heal, she taught a popular professional development course on expressive writing through SCU's Center for Professional Developmentfrom 2004 - 2006, when she relocated to San Diego.
She earned her doctorate in Applied Psychology from the University of Toronto and later studied literary fiction and creative writing through the University of Washington Writers' Program, the Humber School for Writers in Toronto, and the Transformative Language Arts at Goddard College. She is a member of The Association of Writers & Writing Programs, National Association of Poetry Therapy, Transformative Language Arts Network, and the Society for Arts in Healthcare. She is also a Senior Fellow of the American Leadership Forum, Silicon Valley and a member of San Diego Writer's Ink.
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