About Thea

Long Bio

Dr. Thea Iberall is an award-winning writer, storyteller, and scientist. She crosses boundaries between science and the arts, history and the present, and knowledge and emotion. The author of three scientific texts, she has a Ph.D. in Computational Neuroscience (UMass). As a scientist, Thea realized she was more interested in the stories behind the science than the data itself. She began studying writing with Terry Wolverton in Los Angeles in 1990, and has been writing and publishing ever since. She received a Master’s degree in writing from USC and also studied at the Academy for New Musical Theatre and the Moving Art Playwrighting Lab. Thea’s had over 50 poems published in journals and anthologies including The Southern California Anthology, Spillway, poeticdiversity, and numerous other journals. Thea was a semi-finalist in the Fineline Competition Mid-American Review, the Mary Ballard Poetry Chapbook Prize and also in the Atlanta Review International Poetry Competition. In 2001, Thea began exploring how to combine her scientific training with her love of language and she developed a new art form called contextual poetry. While seemingly new, the art form was used by Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), the leading poet of his day and grandfather of Charles Darwin.
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Thea’s poetry ranges across topics from history to science to her family. After her visit to Eastern Europe, she began reflecting on the Holocaust. Her five trips to Greece have generated other poems that explore the birth of the patriarchy. Of course, they would have all been lost if she didn’t jump into the Aegean Sea when her journal flew out of her grip as she was debarking from a cruise ship.
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In 1998, Thea was selected for the slam team to represent Los Angeles at the National Poetry Slams. The team, consisting of Thea, Deborah Edler Brown, Jerry Quickley, and Poetri, made it through the quarterfinals, semi-finals, and all the way to the finals where 1200 people watched along with audiences from CNN. After a hard battle, LA came in 3rd place. “It was a phenomenal experience.”

In 2010, Thea wrote the musical We Did It For You! Women’s Journey Through History about how women got their rights in the United States. A volunteer cast of older women has brought the show to women’s organizations, conventions, colleges, high schools, army bases, museums throughout California and Massachusetts. Thea has given play-reading workshops nationally bringing this important message to high schools, colleges, and organizations. Thea is in the process of completing the film version of this play. Thea has written 11 other plays, including her children’s musical At Seven which was performed by the Toledo Repertory Company, and her Primed for Love which was seen at the Eclectic Company Theatre and in staged readings in various venues. Her one-woman show The Only Thing Greek About Me is my Name has been performed at the Santa Monica Playhouse and other theatres.

Thea is a sought after storyteller and performance poet and has performed at venues across the nation from California to Maine. She has been interviewed on numerous TV programs and was a featured poet in the documentary “GV6 THE ODYSSEY: Poets, Passion & Poetry.”
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Besides poetry and plays, Thea writes fiction. Her novel, The Swallow and the Nightingale, has been hailed as “a masterful blend of science-fiction, history, mythology.” It draws the reader into a fable about 4,000-year-old secret brought through time by the birds, using today’s world of climate change as a backdrop to help awaken people. She reminds us that the visions of Gandhi, religious mysticism, and Native Americans are a more sustainable solution than the patriarchal system under which we live. Since writing The Swallow and the Nightingale, Thea has become an activist for environmental and social justice. She is on the leadership team of the Jewish Climate Action Network and the Green Sanctuary Committee of the First Parish UU Church Medfield. A co-host of the former “Talking Climate” cable TV series, Thea has taught “What’s Your Carbon Footprint?” at various institutions. She now teaches writers how to write stories about climate change. She studied climate change at Univ of British Columbia.

In 2015, along with her family, Thea was inducted into the International Educators Hall of Fame. While she uses her writing to educate while entertaining readers and audiences, Thea is also a teacher. She’s been a college professor and adult education instructor. Since 2005, she has been teaching creative writing. Her favorite topic to teach is writing from the Deep Voice, a technique she learned from Los Angeles poet Jack Grapes.