Cyra Dumitru, PPM

Cyra Dumitru is a lifelong poet, former Poet-in-the-Schools with the San Antonio Independent School District and many other schools, freelance medical writer and a full-time faculty member in the Department of English and Communication Studies at St. Mary’s University.

In 2011, she was awarded the Alice Wright Fanzke Feminist Award for Excellence in Teaching at St. Mary’s University.

Cyra Dumitru, certified Practitioner of Poetic Medicine, was funded for a full academic year to provide In the Shelter of Poetry to students at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas, in collaboration with the student counseling center.

The program provided creative expression and emotional support for students struggling with situational and chronic depression, anxiety, traumatic memory, bereavement due to the loss of a family member, and severe financial insecurity that threatened their ability to complete undergraduate degrees.

Meeting weekly for ten weeks throughout the Fall 2016 and the Spring semesters of 2017 with the sponsorship of IPM’s Poetry Partnership, In the Shelter of Poetry continued through 2018, was renamed Sunflower Poetry Circle and continued until February 2020.

Students active with In the Shelter of Poetry gave a dramatic reading of their work and perspective on poetry circle as healing to about 50 members of the St. Mary’s University community in April 2018. An anthology called Walking with Energy of Roots was produced which features poems and essays by students.