Instructors

Board of directors

Secretary Tammy Blackard Cook is a co-founder and former co-owner of Aspire Counseling Group in Raleigh where she still manages a part-time clinical caseload and serves as a consultant to the owner. Tammy also co-founded The Resiliency Collaborative with her Aspire business partner.

In 2010, Aspire Counseling Group opened in a little house on Hillsborough Street in Raleigh.  Back then, there were very few group mental health practices in the Triangle, and even fewer who had a website!  Building Aspire from the ground up, Tammy and her partner learned many lessons along the way, some the hard way, adapting Aspire to meet the needs of a changing community and market.  

As an undergraduate at UNC-Chapel Hill, Tammy studied journalism, writing for the campus newspaper and serving in various capacities as a desk editor. Her journalism career trajectory changed when she realized that interviewing and hearing people’s stories was her true passion. After 30 years in social work, she’s turned her attention back to writing, taking various classes at Redbud over the years.

In her spare time, Tammy enjoys giving back to the community through service, staying politically engaged, reading, pickleball, and spending time with friends and family. She lives in Raleigh with her husband, two cats, and a dog named Steve. 

Jill McCorkle is the author of seven novels and five story collections; her latest novel Hieroglyphics was published in 2020 and her new collection, Old Crimes, was published in January 2024. Her work has appeared in numerous periodicals and four of her short stories have been selected for Best American Short Stories. She has taught at Harvard, Brandeis, NC State and in the Bennington College Writing Seminars.

Treasurer Dasia Moore is a poet, essayist, and queer child of the Black South. Her work has appeared in publications including The Offing, Hayden's Ferry Review, Fence, The Nation, and The Boston Globe, where she was a reporter and magazine staff writer. Born in Durham and raised in both Carolinas, Dasia received her MFA in poetry from New York University.

Jason Jeffries [bio coming soon!]