David A. Crenshaw

I grew up in a farming community in northwest Missouri. My family and I live in upstate New York in the Hudson Valley and it has been our home for more than four decades. I retired from a busy clinical practice in Rhinebeck, New York after 36 years in June of 2013. I've served as Clinical Director of three Residential Treatment Programs during my career: the Rhinebeck Country School, Astor Home for Children, and currently I am the Clinical Director of the Children's Home of Poughkeepsie. I have taught graduate courses in play therapy and family counseling at Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, and Marist College.

My most popular book is Bereavement: Counseling the Grieving over the Life Cycle. The second most popular book is Evocative Strategies in Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy that contains over 150 practical strategies I've developed to engage extremely challenging and sometimes oppositional children and adolescents. The third most popular book is Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy: Wounded Spirits and Healing Paths. That book is my personal favorite and contains chapters by me and others written with some of my most admired colleagues including James Garbarino, Kenneth Hardy, and Andy Fussner. It contains anecdotes about some of the people who have inspired me and taught me things that textbooks can never provide such as the late Olga Silverstein, an amazing family therapist for many years at the Ackerman Institute for the Family, and the late Walter Bonime, M.D., a Senior Training Psychoanalyst at New York Medical College who provided me psychoanalytic supervision for over 14 years.

I was thrilled to recently co-edit a new book with the acclaimed and internationally known art therapist, Cathy Malchiodi, Ph.D., Creative Arts and Play Therapy for Problems of Attachment, which is the first book in a new series that Cathy and I will be editing for Guilford Press. The series is called "Creative Arts and Play Therapy." The first book contains exciting chapters by Rick Gaskill and Bruce Perry on the latest findings from neuroscience as applied to play therapy and chapters by leading practitioners in the field of art, dance, drama, and music therapy as well as recognized leaders in the field of play therapy such as Eliana Gil, Jennifer Baggerly, Phyllis Booth, addressing a wide range of attachment problems.

A major work in the Creative Arts and Play Therapy series is a co-edited book with Anne Stewart at James Madison University, Play Therapy: A Comprehensive Guide to Theory and Practice. The book contains 36 chapters written by 57 leading teachers, researchers and practitioners in play therapy. This book has a primary appeal to practitioners but because of its comprehensiveness has been adopted by a number of major universities as a text in graduate courses in play therapy. Another book in the series, What to Do When Children Clam-Up in Psychotherapy was co-edited by Cathy Malchiodi and contains remarkable chapters by some of the seminal leaders in our field including Bruce Perry, Steven Porges, Martha Strauss and Rise VanFleet.

Co-writing a book with the acclaimed Eliana Gil was a peak experience and a highlight of my career. The book, Termination Challenges in Child Psychotherapy addresses a topic largely ignored in contemporary psychotherapy literature even though the challenge of a therapeutic closure in child therapy is ubiquitous. We did not want to make this simply an academic treatise on the topic so we pushed each other to be transparent in our own struggles and failures in the termination process.

My last book to date, was written in 2023 in collaboration with the talented Beth Richey, who did the beautiful design work which enabled the reflections and insights gained over the course of my career to be placed on an artistic backdrop that greatly enhanced the appeal of the book written for child therapists, but the overwhelming feedback from readers has suggested that parents, teachers, grandparents as well as child therapists will benefit and be inspired by the reflections in this 62 page booklet. I wrote it with the intention of giving back stemming from the wonderful teachers, mentors, and colleagues who along with the children I've been privileged to work with some of what has been so generously shared with me.