Board Chair/President

Jennifer Fields

Jennifer Fields is a Qualified Mental Health Professional (QMHP), aka classroom therapist, working with neurodivergent adolescents in Portland, Oregon. Jennifer's career has included 4th-12th grade teaching, school counseling, and she co-founded a school and a children's museum. Jennifer has been on boards for a nonprofit children's museum and a cooperative grocery. She has utilized therapeutic writing approaches with small groups of new mothers and also adolescents for decades, after being inspired by a workshop with Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg in Lawrence, Kansas.

Board Co-Chair/Vice President

Sharon Sperry

Sharon is the founder of Better Nature of Work (BNoW), where she partners with people to co-create regenerative, responsible, and meaningful ways of working. With a background in recruitment, HR business partnering, professional development, and leadership mentoring, she brings systems thinking and a passion for fairness, beauty, and sustainable structures. A certified professional coach and Six Sigma Green Belt, Sharon is drawn to TLAN for its commitment to community, connection, and co-creation. She lives in North Lake Tahoe with her partner and is writing her first book about a burned-out dragon reclaiming her fire within. betternatureofwork.com

Board Secretary

Greg Smith

Greg Smith. As someone whose life has been deeply touched by the Transformative Language Arts (TLA), Greg is honored to help further the TLA Network's mission. While he has always supported artists and creatives and appreciated how they enrich our lives; he has only recently begun to create with words himself. He completed a memoir as part of his legacy to his family and has begun a memoir about his wife Diane and their family's experience with Diane's vascular dementia. It was Diane's initial involvement with TLA that opened the door for Greg's participation, and for that he will remain forever grateful! Greg holds a BA in English and a Secondary Education Teaching Certification.

Board Member At Large/Director

Bobbie Jo Morrell

Bobbie Jo Morrell lives in Colorado, has a Master’s degree in Counseling and is a Certified Spiritual Director.

Her spiritual path has led through participating in and leading reflective writing workshops and contemplative practice groups, hiking and backpacking in the Rocky Mountains, including solo backpacking sections of the Colorado Trail. She is currently counseling and leading small groups and workshops in reflective writing while working to finish her memoir. https://shadowhorse.org/

Board Treasurer

Scott Youmans

Scott Youmans, MA, TLA, is a past board member of the TLA Network and graduated from the TLA program at Goddard College. An Interfaith Minister, Scott offers spiritual companionship, facilitates workshops, and supplements these interests by offering technical expertise to values-based organizations. He is currently in the midst of his Clinical Pastoral Education studies at Naropa. Energeticspirit.life

TLA is...

TLA seeks to preserve the richness and diversity of language itself, and the intimacy of human-to-human contact in an increasingly technological age.

Transformative Language Arts (TLA) is a profoundly radical response to the fragmentation, isolation, violence, hopelessness, and despair of our culture. In the same way the word “radical” comes from the word “roots,” TLA brings people literally back to their roots, and from that perspective, gives them a wider view of what they and what their communities might be.

Transformative Language artists envision a merger of the language arts with individual and collective liberation: writing, storytelling, theatre, and music can work towards community-building, cultural and ecological restoration, and personal development.

Vision of the TLA Network

The TLA Network exists to support and promote individuals and organizations that use the spoken, written, or sung word as a tool for personal and community transformation. As such, the Network is committed to providing spaces, both physical and electronic, where people interested in Transformative Language Arts can share resources, network, learn, and enhance their capacity to practice Transformative Language Arts as Right Livelihood in their communities.

Stay in touch

Good ways to know what's happening at TLAN are by subscribing to our weekly newsletter (fill in the form below to subscribe), and reading our semi-monthly Substack publication.

If you have a question, you can reach us here: contact us.

Subscription form

* Mandatory fields

*First name

*Last name

Organization

*Email

*Phone

In honor of

Back

The TLA Network exists to support and promote individuals and organizations that use the spoken, written, or sung word as a tool for personal and community transformation.

The Transformative Language Arts Network (TLAN) is committed to diversity, equity and inclusion in our offerings, organization, and aspirations. Words have the power to question, subvert, and transform limiting cultural narratives as well as reinforce entrenched stories and stereotypes. The TLA Network wants to make clear that we celebrate and uplift conversations across identity and difference, whether rooted in race, religion, social class, ethnicity, disability, health, gender, sexual orientation, age, military service, and other identities.

Access our policies: Cookie Policy, Privacy Policy, Terms of Use

The Transformative Language Arts Network is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization.

TLA Network, 221 Main St. # 4244, Nashua, NH 03060 | hello@tlanetwork.org