Certified Listener Poet,
Cohort 12 Fall 2025
Joy-Jayne Bassey is a Certified Listener Poet Alum from Cohort 12, a poet, visual artist, narrative strategist, and the founder of VerseCare, a poetic narrative practice serving individuals and organizations through attentive listening and the return of human experience in lasting form. Her listening practice is rooted in a decade of consulting work inside complex institutions, where she kept noticing that the most consequential things in the room were never in the report. She is also the founder of MuseVerse Circle, a global poetry collective dedicated to celebrating the soul of the world through language, which gathers seasonally in Kensington, MD, where she also keeps her art studio.
Her visual art practice, drawn toward brutalism and material abstraction, moves in the territory she calls Rust Theology: the conviction that what has been broken, exposed, and weathered carries its own form of beauty, layering scar, story, and sacredness into form. She is deepening her artistic knowledge as a student in the Master Artist Program at The Compass Atelier and is on the doctoral track in Transformational Leadership. When she is not in the work, she is walking, photographing nature, sitting with solitude, drinking coffee at any hour, napping, and losing herself in a K-drama.