Roxane Dinkin, PhD
Welcome to my website! I created this website to celebrate the creativity of the1967 cIass of Isidore Newman School in New Orleans. Newsletter #1 tells you how the project got started back in 1967 when I interviewed four artists in our class. It features the work of Seattle artist Valerie Schurman. Fifteen more newsletters follow, each documenting the professional and creative accomplishments of our Newman classmates.
I was at Newman School for just one year. I was admitted in my senior year along with four other new students. It wasn't the easiest transition, joining a group of 66 students, many of whom had been together since kindergarten and attending each others' birthday parties. But Newman took me in. I felt valued at Newman, and I made lifelong friends.
After graduating from Newman, I attended Sarah Lawrence College because I wanted to major in dance. This was a rather short-lived goal, and I left college for a year to work as an editorial assistant for Industrial Design magazine in midtown Manhattan. I then transferred to Barnard College, where they assigned me to the foreign student advisor, apparently because I was from New Orleans.
I earned a B.A. Cum Laude with a major in biology from Barnard, and I received a doctoral degree in clinical psychology from the University of Miami. I was in private practice as a licensed psychologist for 40 years, first in California and then in Florida, and I retired at the end of 2019.
Retirement gives me the opportunity to use my time and energy for the current project, the Isidore Newman class of 1967. I can explore and hope to understand the creative outpourings of the '67 class. I can also return to that 17-year-old who wanted to be a dance major, although I may never again have the exhilaration of soaring through the air on the flying rings in the Newman gymnastics program. Today I still experience great joy in movement but I stay a little closer to the ground as a certified yoga instructor (www.TriYoga.com) and an Ageless Grace Educator (agelessgrace.com).
Over 30 years ago I was diagnosed with a rare cell-type of aggressive non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. I received psychological and spiritual support from Rabbi Nancy Flam of the Jewish Healing Center of San Francisco, and she invited me to write a booklet called “Living with Cancer, One Day at a Time” for the LifeLights series published by Jewish Lights Publishing. The LifeLights series is still available from Turner Publishing. My story of working with Rabbi Flam was featured in articles in the Washington Post, the LA Times, and Woman's Day.
My husband, Robert J. Dinkin, PhD, and I have co-authored two books about infertility and creativity. Infertility and the Creative Spirit tells the stories of seven highly creative women. Surviving Reproductive Loss: Stories of Creativity and Positive Transformation in Women's Lives tells about the lives of fifty lesser known but very interesting women. Robert and I overlapped for one year at Columbia and Barnard but we didn't meet until years later.
*This website was created with the help of our very able computer consultant, Mr. Dan Able. He's been helping us with various projects and computer crises for over ten years, and we are very grateful.