"Appletrees" by Caroline Harvey

I fell in love with Caroline Harvey and her work in Austin in 2005. She still ranks up there with of the strongest female poets I've met on the national poetry slam scene.

Committed to a life's work of cultivating creativity, awareness and vibrant health, Caroline Harvey is an artist, educator and somatic therapist in Boston.

Caroline laughs when recalling that her imaginary friend as a little girl was the moon. One of her other earliest memories is of leading a meditation about "floating on the ocean" for a group of first grade friends at a slumber party, and she still has the feather collection she began in preschool.

A passionate communicator with a natural fascination for words and expression, Caroline began writing and performing plays, poetry and short stories as a child. Also a lover of movement, Caroline enjoyed formal dance classes for many years and continues to dance as often as she can. Her parents remind her that she was never very good at following the rules she didn't agree with; she skipped past both the third grade and her last two years of high school and at 16 she left home to follow the Grateful Dead around the country. Caroline then relocated to England where she studied creative writing, art history and philosophy at Oxford Tutorial College.

In 2002 Caroline was awarded a master’s degree in dance from University of California Los Angeles' Department of World Arts and Cultures where she wrote and performed a thesis about somatic healing, the witnessed and felt embodiment of intuition and a cross-cultural examination of sacred art. She dove into her studies, exploring anatomy, movement therapy, choreography and site-specific performance, the politics of the body, and many movement techniques including the sacred practices of Afro-Cuban dance and drumming. Both the renowned movement artist/choreographer Simone Forti and the celebrated theater revolutionary Peter Sellars sat on her thesis committee. While at UCLA she also studied at the Department of Theater, Film and Television where she served as a choreographer for films and was the Teaching Assistant for many of the "movement for actors" courses.

Additionally, Caroline holds a BFA in theater from Boston University where she graduated Summa Cum Laude and won the Dean's Award for Academic Excellence. Caroline is a devoted student of health and yoga pioneer Ana Forrest and is a graduate of her Foundational, Advanced, and Continuing Educational Forrest Yoga Teacher Trainings.

She feels incredibly lucky and wholeheartedly indebted to the many pilgrims, elders, family members and mentors who have led the way and lit her path.

A dedicated teacher, professional artist and health practitioner for over a decade, Caroline currently works as a yoga, dance and meditation instructor & workshop leader, a doula (birth attendant), and is in private practice as a somatic Therapist in Boston, specializing in Craniosacral Therapy. She is the creator of Sacred Groove, an ecstatic dance practice, Awakening the Yogini: Extraordinary Yoga and Education for Women, and CranioYoga, the artful synthesis of Restorative Yin Yoga and CranioSacral Therapy. Caroline also teaches two voice curricula, Free Your Voice and Embodied Poetics.

Caroline also teaches and performs poetry nationwide. She was featured in two documentaries and appeared on Season 5 of HBO’s Def Poetry. A past member and coach of multiple Poetry Slam Teams and currently the Poetry Mentor at Berklee College of Music, Caroline has been a part of victories on both national and regional stages. She is especially committed to facilitating creative writing classes for at-risk youth, survivors of trauma and those working to get free from drug and alcohol addiction and she recently completed a poetry and visual arts project, in conjunction with The Attleboro Arts Museum, for teens in foster care called "Between The Lines." She is honored to have been featured at schools and organizations such as YouthSpeaks, The Esalen Institute, Bristol Community College, Northeastern University, UC Berkeley and UCLA.

Caroline's writing, which tracks her belief that even the fiercest traumas contain within them the capacity for profound healing and beauty, has been published in various literary journals and anthologies including the 2005 National Poetry Slam Anthology "High Desert Voices" and the Harvard publication "The Charles River Review." She is currently working on a new collection of poems based on the women Salvador Dali painted and a book about her most recent travels in Asia and Central America.

She continues to collect feathers, to be curious, questioning, pioneering and wild, and she hopes never to stop talking to the moon.