Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D., is an internationally recognized scholar, award-winning poet, Diplomate Senior Jungian psychoanalyst, and cantadora--keeper of the old stories in the Latina tradition. She is the author of many books and audio recordings on the journey of the soul. Her work has been published in more than 40 languages, and her first book, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of The Wild Woman Archetype, was on the New York Times' best-seller list for 145 weeks, as well as other best-seller lists including USA Today, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal.

In the 1960s, Dr. Estés began her work as a post-trauma specialist at hospitals, caring for severely injured children and "shell-shocked" war veterans and their families. She ministers in the fields of childbearing loss and with surviving families of murder victims, as well as critical incident work and PTSD. She served at disaster sites, first developing post-trauma recovery protocol for earthquake survivors in Armenia. That protocol is now used as one of the top three protocols to teach survivors to do post-trauma work onsite within a few hours. After the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, she worked with the students and community from 1999-2003. Currently, she works with 9/11 survivor families on both the East and West coasts.

Dr. Estés shares her insights on politics, spirituality, y and culture, as well as tools for healing in these troubled times, as the managing editor and columnist at the newsblog The Moderate Voice and as a columnist at The National Catholic Reporter online. She continues to publish new works even as the relevance and popularity of her early works continues to expand.

Dr. Estés' work investigates creativity, anger, self-care, childhood wounds, mother-daughter relationships, being “at home” in a challenging world, and much more. She uses the power of metaphor and the art of storytelling to guide listeners through unfamiliar doors of perception and observation: we return with more of ourselves.