Creative Bridges 2025
Writing for Wellbeing and Activism: Building Cultural Bridges
An International Two-Day Conference
13th–14th September 2025
12:00-19:30 & 10:00-17:00
Hosted by Lapidus International
Join Online
Early-bird tickets on sale now
Writing has the power to uncover, heal, and transform. As we write, we shape our world and ourselves.
Inspired by this belief, Lapidus International invites you to participate in a two-day conference that explores the intersections of writing, wellbeing, and activism. This conference is an opportunity for academics, practitioners, writers, and activists from around the world to share knowledge and engage in dialogue on the role of writing in personal healing and social transformation.
This gathering aims to bring together participants from various disciplines to investigate how writing for wellbeing can also serve as a vehicle for activism. We welcome diverse perspectives that examine writing as a method of supporting mental health, fostering resilience, and creating social change.
The conference is proudly sponsored by Balens, a specialist insurance broker for health and wellbeing professionals and organisations, celebrating 75 years of service in 2025! Visit their website balens.co.uk to find out more.
Table of Contents
Event Programme
Dawn Garisch
Invisible Mending: Uncertainty, Anxiety and Creativity
In this powerful and thought-provoking talk, Dawn Garisch, medical doctor, author, and educator, explores how uncertainty, anxiety and creativity have intimate connections. Drawing from her clinical work, teaching, and personal experience, she reveals how both life writing and embodied imagination can help us live less anxiously and more creatively.
Dawn will discuss three ways in which we understand experience: scientific analysis, personal narrative, and unconscious imagery. Whilst science offers measurable evidence in our pursuit of health, it often fails to engage the irrational, emotional layers of our inner lives where many of our impulses towards harm or healing originate. Creativity, she suggests, provides a vital bridge; it allows us to tolerate or even seek uncertainty, to loosen fixed narratives, and to foster insight and change through curiosity and play.
Drawing on neuroscience and poetry, this talk presents creativity as a birthright – an evolutionary development essential to learning, transformation, and healing. Regular creative practice can help us rethink the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, others, and the natural world, reshaping our assumptions and our responses to the unknown.
Elizabeth Torres
Listening Between the Lines
Poetry as Pathways for Healing, Empathy, and Social Change
In an increasingly fragmented world, the intersection of writing, wellbeing, and activism offers a transformative approach to building cultural bridges. Elizabeth Torres, known artistically as Madam Neverstop, will explore how creative expression—particularly poetry—can serve as a powerful tool for promoting empathy, resilience, and cross-cultural dialogue. Through her work as a poet, multimedia artist, and translator, Torres delves into themes of identity, migration, and collective resilience, using poetry as both a personal and political act.
Drawing on her experience as a Listener Poet for the Good Listening Project and through her Poetic Consultations, Torres will highlight the essential role of deep listening—a compassionate, attentive practice that creates genuine connection and understanding. She will discuss how poetry, when paired with deep listening, can humanize healthcare, foster meaningful dialogue, and build solidarity across diverse communities. By listening with intention, both as an artist and a facilitator, Torres demonstrates how writing can become a powerful tool for collective healing, activism, and social change, ultimately bridging cultural divides and empowering voices often left unheard.
Jenny Alexander
Breaking New Ground: How Writing Fiction Can Make Life Better
This taster session explores the therapeutic potential of fiction writing, showing how it can offer comfort, escape, and fresh perspective. Unlike traditional therapeutic writing, fiction lifts us out of our own experiences and into imaginative worlds, but the stories we make in imagination are not random; they are related to our everyday life in the same way as dreams.
This session will explore how writing fiction can help us think more creatively about whatever is worrying or preoccupying us and find creative solutions. It is suitable for all writers, even those who have never written fiction before.
Keynote Speakers
Our Creative Bridges 2025 Keynote Speakers are:
Dawn Garisch - Invisible Mending
Dawn Garisch is a medical doctor, award-winning author, and poet. She has published seven novels, two poetry collections, a memoir, short stories, and non-fiction. Her latest novel, Breaking Milk (Heloise Press, 2024), was shortlisted for the CNA Sunday Times award. Her short story collection What Remains (Karavan, 2023) won the NIHSS and Nadine Gordimer SALA awards.
Dawn is a founding member of the Life Righting Collective, promoting creative writing for wellbeing and community. She lives in Cape Town, performs in a musical duo, and recently became a grandmother.
Elizabeth Torres
Elizabeth Torres, also known as Madam Neverstop, is a Colombian-American poet, multimedia artist, and translator. She has published over twenty poetry collections in several languages, including Lotería: Sorteo Nocturno / Nocturnal Sweepstakes, which won the 2022 Ambroggio Prize. Her recent works include Expediciones a la región furtiva (2023) and MISERABILIA (2024).
Her practice blends poetry, visual art, film, and sound to explore identity and migration. She holds degrees in Media & Film, Fine Arts, and an MFA in Writing for Performing Arts. Founder of Red Door Magazine and the Red Transmissions Podcast, she also created the Poetic Phonotheque, an international poetry archive.
Session Presenters
Please meet our session presenters below – more coming soon!
Jenny Alexander
Breaking New Ground: How Writing Fiction Can Make Life Better
Jenny Alexander is an accomplished author and writing mentor, known for her work exploring the therapeutic and transformative power of writing. She runs writing workshops on a wide range of topics including creative journalling, and her adult non-fiction includes Writing in the House of Dreams, a guide to creative dreaming for writers. Jenny regularly contributes to national magazines and blogs on topics such as personal growth, creativity, and the writing life. Her column for Writing Magazine is in its eighth year. Passionate about helping others unlock their inner voice, she shares monthly reflections and resources through her newsletter and continues to inspire through both her teaching and published work.
Poets-In-Residence
We are thrilled to introduce our 2025 Poets-In-Residence
Nazaret Ranea
Nazaret Ranea is a poet born in Málaga, Spain, and living in Edinburgh since 2017. Named one of Scotland’s Next Generation Young Makars, her writing often touches on themes of nostalgia, memory, and the idea of home, blending personal and universal experiences. Her debut poetry collection, Nettles, is forthcoming with Drunk Muse Press.
Nazaret’s work has found homes in more than fifty publications around the world, appearing in both English and Spanish. She is also the creator of the zines My Men and My Women, and the editor of For Those Who Tend the Soil, an anthology produced in collaboration with the Scottish Poetry Library. She has been fortunate to share her work on BBC Radio Scotland and at events like the Edinburgh Fringe, the Edinburgh International Book Festival, and was the 2025 Poet in Residence at the StAnza Poetry Festival for the Translation Award. You can find out more about her work at www.nazaretranea.com.
Karrish Devan
Karrish Devan is a fiction writer based in East London. His work explores hidden histories and the stories that lie within. He has been published by the Brick Lane Bookshop and Muswell Hill Press. When not writing, he works as a junior doctor in the NHS, specialising in mental health.
He is represented by Abi Fellows of DHH. Follow him on his Substack: www.substack.com/@kdevanwrites
Tickets
We’re excited to announce that tickets for the Creative Bridges 2025 conference are now available to purchase through our website. We really appreciate your support and can’t wait to see you at the event!
Member
£75.00
Student/Low-Income
£60.00
Pay It Forward
£45.00
*Please note that Creative Bridges 2025 takes place entirely online. Only the keynote speeches will be recorded and available to view after the event.
Awards
We’re delighted to open nominations for this year’s Lapidus Awards, celebrating outstanding contributions to the field of creative writing for wellbeing. These awards honour individuals and projects whose work inspires, empowers, and uplifts through the written and spoken word.
Explore the award categories and nominate someone who’s making a difference:
Impactful Creative Voice Award
This award recognises an individual whose creative writing resonates deeply with audiences in the context of wellbeing, healing, or social change/activism. This may be poetry or prose (written, spoken, digital or in a hybrid form). The work will have made a powerful emotional, social, or cultural impact. The winner of this award will be someone who demonstrates courage, authenticity, and the ability to move and/or inspire others.
Outstanding Therapeutic Writing Research Award
This award honours exceptional research that contributes to the field of creative writing for wellbeing and/or creative writing for therapeutic purposes. It can be awarded to academic or practice-based research that provides new insights into the efficacy, methodologies, or theoretical frameworks of writing for wellbeing. The research should demonstrate originality, rigour, and practical relevance to those working in health, education, counselling, or community settings.
Diversity and Inclusion in Writing Award
This award acknowledges a person or project that champions diversity, equity, and inclusion through creative writing. It recognises efforts to amplify marginalised voices, challenge systemic inequalities, and create inclusive spaces for expression and storytelling. This could include work with underrepresented groups, those who have been discounted, prohibited, displaced and/or under-served. This may be multilingual or cross-cultural writing, or inclusive practices in creative writing workshops, publishing, or education.
Make A Nomination
Nominations for the Lapidus Awards to be presented at Creative Bridges 2025 are now open!
If you know someone whose work uplifts, empowers, or transforms through the written or spoken word, we invite you to celebrate their contribution. Whether they’ve inspired change, deepened understanding, or helped others to heal, now is the time to shine a light on their impact.
Nominate an individual or project today using the form below and help us honour excellence in creative writing for wellbeing.
Also presented at the conference…
The Lapidus Lifetime Achievement Award
This prestigious award is presented to an individual who has made a sustained and outstanding contribution to the field of creative writing for wellbeing over many years. It celebrates a lifetime of dedication—through practice, advocacy, research, or leadership. Someone who has advanced the mission of Lapidus and inspired others in the field. The recipient should exemplify integrity, vision, and a deep commitment to the healing power of words.
Contact Information
For general enquiries about the conference, please contact the conference organisers at creativebridges@lapidus.org.uk. Further details regarding the conference programme will be provided closer to the event.
Join us as we gather to explore and celebrate the personal, collective, and political power of words.