Karen and I met again for an update of information.  As I know Karen personally, I get to see the impact she has made and is still making in the lives of prisoners - including having a former prisoner as a roommate in her house. Her focus is on using the prison system to rehabilitate people and send them into the world not only better than they came in but as contributing, adjusted people. She spends her time now teaching from the stage. 

In her words:

I'd like to talk about how to use one's creativity to help transform institutions and society. I think that there is a lot of pain in the world that the medical and the correctional world both get wrong. Both concentrate on the endpoint which is preventable, costly and tragic. I think that creativity through stories, poetry, art, music and how we can touch other people's lives in positive ways can help transform systems and societies. I'll talk about why I wrote my book, but I'd also really like to talk about the healing I saw take place in the prison thru the creative writing and poetry course that was taught by Shaun Griffin, the poet laureate for the state and the inmates he was able to touch and transform. Also, the story of Ismael Santillanes the inmate artist who did the illustrations in my book and is now has a published poetry book called Indelicate Angels. It also happens that he taught fine art to inmate Michael Clifford Helm who is the author of Mayhem- A Life (his memoir where he mentions me and what I did as a prison doctor for him). He came in the prison with not completing high school and left with a high school diploma, 2 years of college and when he left became a nuclear medicine technician.

FIND KAREN HERE: DiscoverDrG.com website Karen Gedney MD LinkedIn Karen Gedney Dr. G Facebook