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).
The circa 1875 painting at the top of this homepage is called "Black Woman" by Ilya Repin. All images on this website are in the public domain.
This website is devoted to my work as a writer and editor. Along with reading about my 30-plus years of editing on the "Editing" page of this website, be sure to examine the drop-down menu on the "Editing Resources" page to learn about my origins as an editor; editorial basics; key elements of narration; a little bit about sentences; a little bit about plots; some warnings about vetting and verifying; and some advice about marketing independently and self-published books. Together these pages constitute a free, no-cost mini-course in editorial advisement drawn from a practice that has sustained me through my sometimes peripatetic life.
Click here to learn more about my work as a nonprofit professional, healer, and educator. I am a clinician. For many years, I was a registered nurse (RN), a registered nurse in psychiatry (RNP), a licensed practical nurse (LPN), and a licensed social worker (LSW). For over 30-plus years, I have been a progressive, humanist ordained Buddhist Upāsikā.
When I am not writing and editing, I work as a community organizer for peace, violence prevention, justice, and environmental care. I am the Executive Director of Wisdom Projects, a nonprofit organization devoted to violence prevention, wellness, and justice for low-income people.
Since the late 1980s, I have 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 the Shakespeare Theatre Company; a copywriter for many businesses and advertising agencies; 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 knew even as a toddler that the way we talk about the complexities and nuances of life (especially about conflict between others and harm towards the vulnerable)--and when we choose or are able to speak out--is as important as our content.
Direct and clear, even when complex, my writing has always carried a fastidious attention to form and structure (in a scriptural and restorative manner) as well as a patternistic understanding of content and style.
If you are moved by anything I say on this web-page, then please donate. People like me always need money to help others and sustain ourselves through difficult times. Please click on to the button below and donate to my nonprofit organization. We are doing incredible anti-violence work. Contact me for more details.
I am a lifelong disability rights, anti-violence, and anti-war advocate. These vocations arise from my firsthand experiences.
I share the following information to define myself because others have so often tried to define me.
Diagnosed as on the autistic spectrum and hyperlexic as an infant, I first began reading newspapers, magazines, encyclopedias, and full-length books at the age of 2½ and writing poems and diary entries (which I called "Letters to God") at the age of 3.
At 4, my mother took my writings away from me, fearing that they revealed the considerable violence (burning, beatings, sexual assault, and verbal harassment by multiple family members) to which I was subjected during my infancy and toddler years.
At 5, my mother, effectively, sold me to a known predator, child sex trafficker, actor, director, and theatrical agent named Kenneth Warren Daugherty, a man who was never brought to justice for his many crimes against children.
For two years off and on, from the ages of 5 to 7, Mr. Daugherty drove me to "auditions" in various states on the East coast and in Los Angeles and Las Vegas where I was raped with other children as well as filmed and photographed being harmed by men like Raymond St. Jacques, Matthias Herrmann, and Thomas N. Trager.
To my knowledge, none of these men (and others whose names I still do not know and the fewer women who co-committed and enabled their crimes) has ever been held to account for their crimes against children. Each man whose name I say here spent considerable time and effort trying to silence me (especially in the 1980s and early 1990s) when I spoke out about their crimes.
After entering foster facilities again at around 8 years old, I was twice brutally gang-raped at the final foster facility to which I was interned, sustaining body-altering, lifelong injuries. I was attacked so severely because I refused to shut up about the atrocities committed against me and other children.
Now even into my older years, I refuse to be silent. My voice is the greatest antidote to the poison of their power. Predators and annihilators crave total power. For them there is no greater power than victims' and survivors' complete silence and painful disappearance.
Their next greatest power is their total control over marginalized and vulnerable people. They live and breathe to control because their deepest illness is that they are, in fact, incredibly out-of-control.
Predators' third greatest aim is dehumanization. That is why predators so often do more than physical and verbal harm. They lust for emotional torture: debasement and humiliation. Jokes, insults, bullying, and torture go hand in hand with their other crimes.
My mother was correct: I have been speaking out in multiple platforms against violence since my toddler years--in writing, as a community organizer, and as a public speaker.
I sharpened my anti-war advocacy in my international nonprofit work in West Africa, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and China.
After my diaries were taken away by my mother as a toddler, I received my earliest writing back when I entered foster care for the first time at the age of 7 (I was in foster care 6 times during my childhood at deeply abusive, horrible facilities).
I discovered that a social worker gave my writings to my pediatrician, Dr. Margaret Mary Nicholson, for safekeeping. Dr. Nicholson was the only person I trusted throughout my childhood.
Amazingly, my mother had not destroyed my writings even though they included incriminating evidence of her own and others' crimes written (albeit sometimes with a child's cadence) in the same detailed, direct voice that you, the reader of this website, are reading now.
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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