Biography:


Green Windows brought together Peggy's passions: creative writing and fostering communities in which the traditionally unheard play a vital role and where each person's potential is fulfilled.

Peggy is settling in Santa Cruz, California. She was born in Oakland, California and came back to Oakland in 2002 after living in four other states and in four other countries on three continents. 


Contact her here.

Peggy's current projects:

  • Facilitator: 
    • ​Contract and fractional.
    • Santa Cruz Poetry Project volunteer: facilitating poetry classes in the county jails and public library. 
    • Emerging Santa Cruz creative writing workshops - including Ink Drop, before Mic Drop, the last Sunday of every month at The 418 Project.
  • Writer: daily practice, mostly poeting and journaling. Currently working on a collection of writing done during the last years of her mother's life. Also sending out two manuscripts. One is an autobiographical novel. The other is a collection of her own poems, journal entries and creative nonfiction written in response to working with incarcerated youth over seven years. This collection is an emotional chronicle of her own transformation and also a collection of the youths' writing.​

Examples of Peggy's facilitation experience: 

  • Creative Writing Workshops with AWA facilitation since 2008. See list here. 
  • ATD Fourth World USA
    • Strategic Renewal Dialogues: Designed, directed, facilitated, and trained colleagues to facilitate a 70-person, 7-month national strategic process to reframe the core values, mission, and vision and focus ongoing work in 7 key outcome areas.
    • Poverty and Racism national discussions, including facilitator training of key POC staff
    • Board of Directors Retreat
    • Multi-Dimensional Aspects of Poverty peer groups
    • ​Creative writing workshops with groups of people with very different literacy levels.
    • Professional development writing workshops with social justice activists and adult education teachers.
    • ​​​​Theatre of the Oppressed workshops about criminal justice with activists of different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds
  •  The Beat Within 
    • Facilitated writing workshops weekly in the local juvenile hall and bimonthly in San Quentin state prison and offering mentorship and training to other facilitators. Volunteer facilitator and editor from 2008 to 2020.
  • ​Oakland Public Library Teen Services​
    • Staff retreat planning
    • Department vision/mission statement development 
  • International ATD Fourth World Movement
    • Creative and Information Technology projects with children and teens in disadvantaged neighborhoods in the USA and Europe.
    • Facilitation of anti-poverty groups made up of youth activists from very different cultural, socio-economic and lingual backgrounds.
    • Theatre of the Oppressed facilitator and trainer​​

Summary of Peggy's overall experience:

  • 2020 - 2025, served as Strategic Facilitation Director, Operations Manager, Acting Communications Director for  ATD Fourth World USA.  Adjunct to the National Executive Team; Lead Coordinator of the Strategic Renewal Dialogues; Manager of national operations and systems transitions, including HR, compliance, CRM, and internal communications.

  • 2009 - 2020, directed and facilitated Green Windows' AWA creative writing workshops, and ran Green Windows' trainings and workshops in partnership with social justice and youth organizations. 
 
Peggy Simmons' LinkedIn

​Community work:
  • ​Since 1992, Peggy has designed and facilitated creative and communications workshops for children and adults of different backgrounds, including working in some of the most "disadvantaged" neighborhoods of New York, Paris, London and Oakland and in Alameda County's juvenile hall.​
  • She spent twelve years working alongside and training low-literacy youth and adults in retail establishments and in human rights anti-poverty projects.
  • Peggy is Amherst Writers and Artists Writing Group Leader Certified, facilitating diverse community and youth workshops since 2008.

Published creative writer
  • Poetry and flash fiction by Peggy has been published in several journals including SLAB, flashquake (where nominated for a Pushcart Prize), and Word Riot, under the pen name Meg Claudel.
  • Meg Claudel's poem “Free Sunset” was chosen as part of the Temescal Insitu public art project, currently part of an urban mural.
  • Peggy has self-published and edited or co-edited collections from writing workshops: five books (four of them here) and four chapbooks.​
  • Peggy has finished three manuscripts which are looking for the right home: one creative memoir, one novel and one nonfiction book about writing workshops in juvenile hall,