Thea Iberall, Neighbor

Dr. Thea Iberall is a poet and scientist. She represented Los Angeles at the National Poetry Slams in Austin where they made the finals. Her poetry book, The Sanctuary of Artemis (Tebot Bach), is a collection of contextual poems that explores the roots and origins of Western patriarchal culture. She has a Master’s Degree in Professional Writing (USC) and a Ph.D. in computational neuroscience (UMass). Among the many plays she has written, Iberall is the author of We Did It For You! -- the story of how women got their rights in America told by the women who were there. She gives play-reading workshops to help women and girls learn what it took to get our rights and how to break out of cultural constraints. Iberall teaches writing and completed her first novel The Swallow and the Nightingale about a 4,000 year old secret brought through time by the birds. Hailed by The Hummingbird Review as a novel ‘worth reading over and over again,’ it addresses sexism, racism, and environmental decay. Iberall says her strength in writing is to cross the boundaries between science and the arts, between history and the present, and between knowledge and emotions.