Warm greetings to you! My name is Miss Cleis Abeni. (My other name is tree turtle.) If you are meeting me through this website or through my writing and editing, please call me Miss Abeni. If you are a friend, call me by my first name, Cleis. (Cleis rhymes with dice. To pronounce my name, use a hard "KL" sound at the beginning of Cleis).
This website is devoted to my work as a writer and editor. (Click here to learn more about my work as a nonprofit professional, healer, and educator.) For over 30-plus years, I have been a progressive, humanist ordained Buddhist Upāsikā. Since the late 1980s, I have also been a professional writer, an investigative journalist, a grant-writer, a creative writer, and a multifaceted editor (both freelance and on-staff). I was the staff copyeditor for the Baltimore Alternative; a project manager, staff writer and editor for the Institute for Survey Research; and a multifaceted reporter for the Baltimore City Paper and the Philadelphia City Paper.
My journalism, essays, poems, and fiction have also appeared in 30-plus news outlets, literary magazines and journals since 1988 like Reimagining Magazine; Prick of the Spindle; Capitol Black Arts Bulletin; Mountain Record: The Zen Practitioner's Journal; Columbus Alive; Dance Research Journal; Dance Magazine; Dance View; Ploughshares; Good Foot Magazine; Fence Magazine; Identity Principle; Locus; Press Board Press Magazine; Spoon; The New Baltimore Visitor; Urbanite; The Formalist; The James White Review; Journal for the Anthropological Study of Human Movement; Hook; The Washington Review; Tomorrow Speculative Fiction Magazine; and more.
I am a lifelong peace educator; restorative justice practitioner; multifaceted healer; carer; health navigator; former nurse; life science teacher; environmentalist; trainer; mediator; and facilitator who helps people work through conflicts. Consequently, when I am not writing and editing, I work as a community builder, movement organizer, and advocate for peace, violence prevention, justice, equality, and environmental care. I have also been a nonprofit executive and an administrator that has helped several organizations execute high-quality violence prevention projects, justice-oriented programs, science programming, arts programming, and educational programming, as well as operations and fundraising.
A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
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