When we discover that we can wrap words around our losses, our hopes and our dreams, our voices become visible and we are all richer for it.
Merna is a passionate social justice educator who brings her lifelong love of the written and spoken word to her teaching. She is a nationally known storyteller, a teaching artist and a published poet and essayist.
As a 2008 recipient of a National Storytelling Network Brimstone Award for Applied Storytelling, Merna brought storytelling and poetry to a pilot project at BRIDGES: A Center for Grieving Children in Tacoma, WA. The BRIDGES project with young people experiencing life altering trauma and loss was a stepping stone toward Merna’s work with refugees and immigrants who had lost loved ones and a known way of life. In 2009, she founded the Stories of Arrival: Refugee and Immigrant Youth Voices Poetry Project at Foster High School in Tukwila, WA which has received national recognition for bringing refugee and immigrant stories of loss and hope into wide public awareness.
Merna is recognized as an extraordinary teacher with years of experience offering classes and workshops for all ages from young children, to university students, to elders. She has a Master’s Degree from the University of WA with specialization in children’s and young adult literature and additional training in the U.S. and Europe in Expressive Arts and Theater in Education.
Merna is also a dedicated organic gardener, a baker and a cook. She inherited her love for gardens and stories from her grandfather, a wise and practiced gardener who loved to sing, tell tales and savor “garden to table” meals. Her collaborative endeavors with Project Feast for refugee women cooks and the International Rescue Committee’s New Roots gardening and food justice programs for both youth and elders reflect her devotion to the connections between gardens, food and cultures. She writes, I think coming to the table to break bread is at once the most basic act of sustenance and the most elaborate metaphor for how we might live together. Her work with food, gardens and sustainability has given her the honor of presenting keynotes for the annual conference of the WA State Food Coalition and the Palouse Tables Project Food Summit on Regeneration and Resilience and the Power of Storytelling.
A longtime resident of Vashon Island, Merna was the 2017-19 Vashon Poet Laureate. She lives with her husband Rob on a small organic blueberry farm that brings them both continual gratitude for stewarding the land and sharing the bounty of fruit trees and gardens with their community.