Diane Richard-Allerdyce, PhD, comes to Antioch University from the Ph.D. program in Interdisciplinary Studies at Union Institute & University, where she taught from 2008 through 2023 and served as Associate Dean and Chair of Humanities & Culture. She brings to the table a multi-leveled teaching practice, a rich research and creative writing agenda, and extensive administrative experience. Diane is thrilled to join the PhD in Leadership & Change program at Antioch!
In 2001, Diane co-founded the Toussaint L’Ouverture High School for Arts & Social Justice, a Florida charter school serving mostly immigrant students from the Caribbean, and served as its Chief Academic Officer for twenty-one years, until its closing in 2022. She also developed and directed Teaching by Heart, a teacher-training program in Haiti, where she traveled frequently from 2009 through 2019. Diane was trained as a poetry therapy facilitator through the National Association for Poetry Therapy, for which she is a past president as well as a longtime member. She is an anti-bias facilitator within the Anti-Defamation League’s “A World of Difference” program.
Diane is the author of a scholarly book on the writer Anaïs Nin (Northern Illinois University Press, 1998), as well as several scholarly articles and chapters, most recently on the intersection of psychoanalytical theory with somaesthetic philosophy.
Her creative publications, in addition to several individual poems, include a chapbook, Whatever It Is I Was Giving Up (Pudding House, 2007), and a collection of poetry and prose, House of Aching Beauty (EditionsPerleDesAntilles, 2012). Her story “The Gift” appeared in the North American Review (Fall 2019: 304.4): 43-50). (It was inspired, in part, by Wallace Stegner’s “Goin’ to Town”; an interview about her creative process appears at https://northamericanreview.org/open-space/conversation-diane-allerdyce-discusses-her-story-gift-her-partner-rory-spearing ).
Her short story “Kochma” appeared in Stories that Need to be Told 2022: A TulipTree Anthology; it was also first-place winner in the UK-based National Association of Writers and Groups (NAWG)’s 2022 Open Competition for Fiction and was republished with permission in The Write Path 2022, NAWG’s Anthology of Award-Winning Writing.
Diane lives in Boynton Beach, Florida, with her husband, Rory. She loves teaching yoga, playing the French horn, hosting writing groups, and visiting her kids and grandkids in Asheville, North Carolina, and Sunnyside, New York.
