Exciting News! Redwing is currently working on a new book about the process of offering Poetic Medicine sessions for Healing, Grief/Loss, and Resiliency.

Redwing Keyssar, RN is a Palliative Care Clinician, author, poet, educator, national presenter, and frequent contributor to the public conversation about palliative and end of life care. Redwing offers her perspective to individuals and groups who are interested in examining the junction between our relationship to living fully and our understanding of impermanence, as well as those desiring to explore the changes needed in our healthcare system to better serve us all at the end of life.

Redwing has traversed an amazing 30+ year journey through the healing arts during the infancy and evolution of palliative care. Her intention in becoming a nurse was to be a midwife to the dying and tend to the critically and terminally ill. As her career migrated from oncology to critical care to hospice and palliative care, her own cancer diagnosis thrust her into the world of her patients’ experiences, and to facing her own mortality. 

Redwing is currently the Director of Patient and Caregiver Education at the MERI Center (Making Education Relevant and Integrated) for Primary Palliative Care Education  at the Mt. Zion Campus of the University of California, San Francisco.

As part of this program she leads weekly Poetic Medicine sessions, quarterly Advance Care Planning workshops for patients and their families, and End of Life caregiver trainings to help people be prepared to assist friends and loved ones who are dealing with serious illness. For a schedule of workshops at UCSF, please go to: https://Meri.ucsf.edu

For more information or a copy of Redwing’s full resume, please contact her directly at jrkeyssar@gmail.

Workshops with Redwing

Redwing continues to offer occasional in-person workshops, presentations and keynotes, as well as private consultations and advocacy regarding issues of palliative and end of life care.

SEE UCSF MERI CENTER at link below
Poetic Medicine workshops and “Last Acts of Kindness”
https://MERI.UCSF.EDU

 

“Let us change the face of dying in our culture from one of fear and anxiety to one of acceptance and compassion.
Inevitable as death is for all beings, let us work to create experiences that are positive, potent, and transformational.”

–Judith Redwing Keyssar

(from her award winning book, Last Acts of Kindness: Lessons for the Living from the Bedside of the Dying)

 

 Compassionate Care Leadership Awards
Recognizes Redwing Keyssar for Outstanding Service

The Coalition for Compassionate Care of California honored Judith Redwing Keyssar, RN with a 2015 Compassionate Care Leadership Award. The award recognizes an individual who is changing the way we care for seriously ill people or those approaching the end of life. The award was presented at the 2015 CCCC 7th Annual Summit on Palliative Care: A Call to Action in Sacramento.

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American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine
2019 Humanities Award

This prestigious award recognizes Redwing as author, teacher, national presenter and contributor to the public debate about palliative care. Her poetry presentations at the Annual Assembly of AAHPM have inspired others to discover their own voice, using poetry as a tool for self-expression, self-care and resilience. She brings another dimension of humanity to her work by speaking about her own experience as a cancer patient.