Revisionary Art’s founding director, Dr. Rosemarie Dombrowski, began exploring the medicinal value of poetry over two decades ago. As the single parent and primary caregiver to a son with nonverbal Autism and intellectual disabilities (as well as other biomedical comorbidities), her poetry became a space for sharing her son’s story as well as processing her own pain and trauma, the latter of which eventually led her to a specialization in Narrative Medicine/Poetry Therapy and the Medical Humanities.

After receiving a Poet Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets in May 2020, she was inspired to create RA and make poetry therapy a more widely recognized complementary modality.