Lara Naughton is a New Orleans-based writer, teacher and compassion trainer. With more than twenty years teaching and facilitation experience, she has worked with students K-12 as well as adults, and has led writing classes with people who have faced challenging circumstances, including homelessness, domestic violence, HIV/AIDS, wrongful conviction, incarceration, and torture. She is a certified Compassion Cultivation Trainer through the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University School of Medicine, founder of the Compassion Program at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, LA, and creative writing faculty member at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. Her work has appeared in The Sun, Salon, Guernica, Refinery29, Narratively, and Bustle, among other publications. Her writing also includes the documentary stage play Never Fight A Shark in Water: The Wrongful Conviction of Gregory Bright and memoir The Jaguar Man.

Originally aired on April 6th 2019.