Carol Burbank founded Storyweaving, LLC in 2004 to offer professional, compassionate, and effective writing coaching, editing, and publication development services. Based in years of research into creativity, and built on her own background as a journalist, researcher published poet, and award winning playwright, Carol offers strategic and personalized services to support excellence for writers of all levels. She writes a monthly column on leadership for Science of Mind Magazine, writes articles for magazines and collections, and teaches at Pacifica Graduate Institute. She teaches writing intensives and workshops at the Storyweaving Retreat Center, and facilitated the Accokeek Women’s Writing Group since 2012, as well as a creatives support group since the pandemic lockdown. She lives in Fort Washington and shares her woodland home near the river with two cats and annual moonflower gardens, and offers space for personal retreats and workshops through the Storyweaving Retreat Center.

Since 2015, she has collaborated with a research and training consortium, offering cross-disciplinary collaboration to develop innovative, practical tools that empower educators, employers, parents, administrators, and counselors to support all learners—from high academic achievers to those with other unique skills and talents valued in the workplace and in our communities. In service of this opportunity, she has extended her academic writing, editing, facilitation and curriculum design skills, as well as her experience as a professor and secondary school teacher, to increase the resilience and capacity of educators. She also works with organizations to design creative and practical leadership programs in non-profits and spiritual centers. This work grew out of her interest in creative problem solving and change management, as well as her coaching and writing.

Her Storyweaving mission supports these evolving initiatives through the core value that creativity is a source of resilience, personal strength, and professional leadership. Writers and artists are vital for a healthy society; supporting their creative development benefits their well-being as well and their audiences. In alignment, offering coaching and writing services to individuals and organizations opens up avenues for cultural creativity and builds resilience by opening up opportunities, solutions to persistent challenges, and transformative leadership.

Publications

Carol Burbank’s play, Shelter, was a finalist at the prestigious Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwright’s Institute and produced in Baltimore, MD. Her poetry has been published in anthologies and journals such as Rolling Stone, and A Room of One’s Own. For 20 years, she served as a theater critic for the Chicago Reader and other weekly and monthly arts publications. She is a regular columnist on spirituality and leadership for Science of Mind Magazine, and business development for On Purpose Woman. In 2021, with her mother, she co-authored a children’s book to help little ones weather Covid restrictions, Stay-at-Home Bears, telling the story of a typical day of three teddy bear siblings home together.

Her research on leadership and education has appeared in multiple anthologies and academic journals, including Women and Leadership, Global Women’s Leadership, The Transforming Leader, Integral Leadership Review, Theorizing Women and Leadership, and Indigenous Issues and Culture. She was the primary researcher and author of a groundbreaking literature review about inclusion for students with disabilities, published March, 2019 and updated in August of 2021 through the National Alliance and Pipeline for Equity (NAPE). In October, 2021, her more detailed literature review summarizing groundbreaking theories and practice for equity development for all underrepresented groups was published as the backbone of NAPE’s new mission.

She has also codified her research into story and archetype as forces to support healthy change with a self-help system that builds confidence, vision, and creativity. Her first workbook, Storyweaving Playbook One: Answer the Call to Adventure was published in 2015. Her workbook, Raise the Bar on Your Writing: A Guide for Well-Rounded Mastery of Writing Craft is scheduled for publication in 2025.