Joy Roulier Sawyer, who will be teaching the online class “The Art of Facilitation: Roots & Blossoms of Facilitation” with Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, has spent decades facilitating writing workshops. She has helped many communities and groups find their truest words and most vibrant visions through the power of their words, which she writes about in this brilliant essay, “Library of Dreams — Bibliotherapy and the Beautiful Barrio” published in E Magazine.  She writes in this essay about what she learned in her facilitation work:

I soon realized that a movement from self-expression into craft—into laboring to revise and polish abstracts into sensory specifics—is what eventually results in the most personal insight and transformation. This is exactly what so many writers and poets have known intuitively for years: that such literary crafting can be actually be life-changing.

Joy plans to bring what she’s learned from years of such facilitation into the online class she is developing with Caryn so that others called to lead such groups and work one-on-one with emerging writers and storytellers, change-makers and seekers, can find more of the tools they need.

Joy Roulier Sawyer is the author of two poetry collections, Tongues of Men and Angels and Lifeguards as well as several nonfiction books. Her poetry, essays, and fiction have been widely published. Joy holds an MA from New York University in Creative Writing and a master’s degree in counseling. Her extensive training and experience as a licensed professional counselor and in  poetry/journal therapy gives her special expertise in facilitating expressive writing workshops. Joy was selected by poetry therapy pioneers to revise and update Arleen McCarty Hynes’ groundbreaking textbook, Biblio/Poetry Therapy: The Interactive Process. For over a decade, she’s taught at Denver’s Lighthouse Writers Workshop, the largest literary center in the West. Along with her other creative writing and poetry classes, Joy helps facilitate Lighthouses’s Denver Public Library, Arvada Library, and Edgewater Library’s Hard Times workshops, designed for those experiencing homelessness or poverty, as well as the Writing to Be Free program, an outreach for women transitioning out of incarceration. She has also taught at the University of Denver and in the TLA MA program at Goddard College. Find her on Twitter and Instagram.

“The Art of Facilitation: Roots & Blossoms of Facilitation” is the first of two new classes the TLA Network is offering with the second one, “The Art of Facilitation: Facilitating Community and Change” launching this summer. See more here.