Melissa W. Bartholomew is a racial justice and healing practitioner. She practiced public interest law for nearly ten years in Seattle, WA which included serving as an Assistant Attorney General with the Office of the Attorney General and then as a legal aid attorney with the Northwest Justice Project. She is also a mediator and served as the Dependency Mediator for King County Superior Court in Seattle prior to moving to Massachusetts to pursue a Master of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School. Bartholomew is the Racial Justice Fellow at Harvard Divinity School for the 2018-2019 academic year, and is also an Instructor in Ministry at HDS.
Bartholomew is pursuing her PhD in social work at Boston College School of Social work, and is a co-founder of the Racial Justice Symposium at BCSSW. Her research interests include the impact of racism, incarceration, and other systems of oppression on the mental health of African Africans, and the role of spirituality in their resilience. She currently serves as a facilitator with the Transformational Prison Project which supports the work of restorative justice in prisons and communities in MA. Bartholomew facilitates racial healing workshops utilizing her framework, Healers of the Wound: Healing Racism from the Inside Out www.healersofthewound.org. She is fiercely committed to a cross-disciplinary approach to eradicating racism and advancing healing and societal transformation.
