Hi, I’m Michelande (mi-SHEL-lawnd). I am a poet, scientist, and teacher. I am the daughter of first-generation Haitian immigrants who built and taught at their grade school in Haiti before building their lives in the United States. I was born in Washington, DC, and grew up in the DC-Maryland-Virginia area, where I made most of my childhood memories with my parents, older brother, extended family, and friends. I earned my undergraduate degree in Psychology at The George Washington University and a Masters's in Health Care Administration from the University of Maryland Global Campus.

I didn’t connect my parents’ vocations and my love of the learning and teaching process until much later in life. I love creating order out of chaos, building relationships between adversaries, and finding truth in misunderstandings. Most of the things I’ve learned, believed, and written on this site about my faith, health, science, relationships, and growth have evolved with time. Like staircase wit (l'esprit de l'escalier), the best insights come after experiences—that is, throughout the transformational process.

As a public health advocate and lover of continuous improvement (both professionally and personally), I have made a living off of developing insights from transformational change via clinical research and quality improvement and sharing that knowledge. At times, it’s in the form of scientific publications. You can find some of the work I have previously published alongside many professional colleagues in the Official Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Journal of Perinatology, Vaccine, BMC Infectious Diseases, and several other peer-reviewed medical journals. 

Other times, I share insights in prose and poetry. I especially love poems—every style and length because metaphors color the blank tapestries where ideas are birthed and make sense of the seemingly obscure and abstract. Through writing poetry, I have found more wisdom in my deep desire to investigate, test, and change my beliefs, than in the ideas themselves. We are all in constant evolution. And the process of writing one’s song and publishing it transforms earthly to heavenly. We are all poets, but for those who are skeptical of how to play with rhyme and meter, I believe we are all capable of enjoying and perhaps even being transformed by reading poetry. I hope you join me on this journey of discovery and pick up a pen or a verse.

My debut chapbook, The Exquisite Pain of Flowering, which I published under my imprint, The Poetic Method Publishing, is available worldwide in print and digital formats. I am pursuing a doctorate in education in applied learning sciences and currently working in improvement science in pediatric health care in Miami, Florida.