This month’s Spotlight of the Month honors Tricia Krauss-Lehrman: Speech-Language Pathologist Edition!
Tricia was born and raised in Fort Worth. She left Texas after high school, intending to never return. After getting her BA in Psychology from Washington University in St. Louis, she earned her MMS degree in Speech-Language Pathology from Emory University in Atlanta. Tricia then moved to Albuquerque for her first job. A few years later in 1982, she returned to Texas to take a job at the UTD/Callier Center for Communication Disorders with the intention of only staying for a year or two. Well, who knew she would fall in love with both her job at the Callier Center and a mad scientist who picked her # at a Jewish Singles event and had to dance with her?!?! Tricia and her husband, Mark, have 2 amazing children: Danielle and Ben. They also have 2 cats, Onyx and Tori, who are senior citizens in the feline world. When Tricia is not working, she can be found doing yoga, working out at Curves, spending time with friends, or making pottery…a passion of hers for almost 20 years!
While in graduate school, it became immediately apparent that Tricia had an affinity for working with people who stutter. She attended her first Dallas NSA meeting in the fall of 1982, a few months after the chapter was formed. Tricia quickly became a “regular”, needlepoint in hand, and claims she learned more about stuttering from participating in the monthly NSA meetings than she learned in her graduate course on Stuttering! Emory would probably NOT be happy to hear that! Her early experience with the NSA helped form her holistic approach to working with individuals who stutter and she has always advocated involvement in self-help as an adjunct to speech therapy. After years participating in/referring to the adult chapter and seeing the potential benefits of self-help for adults who stutter, one could say Tricia was bitten by the self-help bug! Since 2001, she developed YESS (Youth Experience Stuttering Support) a support group for Dallas area children ages 6-12 who stutter and their parents; restarted the Dallas TWST group for teens who stutter and their parents; and created a group for parents of preschoolers who have begun to stutter! In this way, she accomplished her goal of insuring that a support network exists for anyone in the DFW area who is impacted by stuttering! Tricia attended her first NSA conference in 1991 but has only attended on a regular basis since 2009. She’s totally hooked on the positive energy and life-changing potential that she finds there every year and never fails to cry her way through the last 24 hours of the conference! It is fair to say Tricia has spent her 35 years in Dallas trying to make life better for people who stutter.
Next time you see Tricia ask her to show you a couple yoga moves, (namaste, everyone!).
Thank you for all the work you have done and are doing, Tricia.
You have been instrumental to the success of this organization.