Patricia Contaxis’ work has appeared in The Coachella Review, The Pluralist, The Loch Raven Review, Wrath-Bearing Tree, San Antonio Review, Pithead Chapel, and Notes From The Seashore. She is the recipient of a 2024 PLAYA residency for work on climate change. Her essays Luminous Things and Plein Air were short-listed for the Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest. Retired after more than thirty years as a marriage and family therapist, she now spends her time on Trail Patrol with the National Park Service, on Hawk Watch with the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory, and on mandolin and fiddle with Tangled Root.
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Patricia Contaxis, M.A. is a retired licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. For more than three decades, she counseled middle school and high school age youth, parents, couples, and individual adults in public settings and private practice. Her community clinical work includes: school-based counselor at Walnut Creek Intermediate School and Oakland’s Ralph Bunche School; staff therapist for The Ann Martin Children’s Center, La Cheim Residential Treatment Centers, and the Bay Area Youth Development Agency. For 22 years she was the consulting clinical director to Building Futures, an East Bay agency providing emergency shelter, domestic violence programs and transitional and permanent housing to women and children. For over a decade, she was contracted by Contra Costa County to provide mandated training and continuing education to foster and adoptive parents. Bay Area schools where she consulted on social, behavioral and community issues, and offered parent education programs include: Albany, Berkeley, El Cerrito, and Piedmont public schools; The Julia Morgan School for Girls; Bishop O’Dowd; St. Theresa School; The Dandelion Nursery School; and BlueSkies For Children. She was on the faculty of Diablo Valley College, and was an adjunct professor of psychology at John F. Kennedy University.