Healer, organizer, educator, designer, editor, peacemaker & storymaker.

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.

I am a tenacious, lifelong practitioner of healing Black womanist femmage. In other words, I take grassroots, ordinary elements and techniques of Black women's experiences (like nursing, caretaking, designing, editing, and collage, as well as all manner of visual, textual, and physical practices) and I weave them into narratives that uplift, challenge, and restore people.

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, a 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. 

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.  

When I am not writing and editing, I work as a community organizer for peace, violence prevention, justice, equality, 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.