As the Co-Founder of Toussaint L'Ouverture High School for Arts & Social Justice in Boynton Beach, Florida, Diane Allerdyce, Ph.D., is an activist deeply involved in community outreach and education reform. She taught and held administration positions at Lynn University, full time from 1985 until founding the charter school in 2001, and part time through 2008, when she became an affiliated faculty member in the Humanities track of the Cohort Ph.D. Program in Interdisciplinary Studies at Union Institute & University. She is currently a half-time core faculty member in the Cohort Ph.D. program.
Diane holds the Ph.D. in English from the University of Florida. Her M.A. and B.A. in English are from Florida Atlantic University. She is the author of a scholarly book, Anaïs Nin and the Remaking of Self: Gender, Modernism and Narrative Identity (University of Northern Illinois, 1998), and a chapbook, Whatever It Is I was Giving Up, which won the 2007 Red Wheel Barrow Prize by Pudding House. She has published articles, essays, book reviews, and poems in local, national, and international journals and has has been a featured poet on the Unitarian Universalist Poets Cooperative web page.
Dr. Allerdyce is trained as a poetry therapy facilitator by, and is the past-President and a current long-time Board Member of, the National Association for Poetry Therapy (NAPT). Diane received the NAPT Distinguished Service Award in 2007 and the NAPT Outstanding Achievement Award in 2009.
Diane is a National Trainer for the Classroom of Difference Program of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). She is also a member of the Board of Directors for the Haitian League and a consultant for ReThinkHaiti's Education Task Force. She is actively involved in education reform efforts for Haiti.
