J. Faye D’Avanza

Writer | Librarian
Creative Care Practitioner
Founder, Library of Care

J. Faye D’Avanza, MSLIS is a writer, creative care practitioner, librarian, and founder of Library of Care, creative empowerment coaching, workshops, and nourishing creative spaces and experiences to help you live, feel, and create with more joy and ease in your whole creative life. 

For over twenty years, she worked in public libraries beginning as a book shelver during Y2K, a Reference Librarian during The Great Recession, and a Community Engagement Librarian who managed a vibrant public programming department, facilitated a Cookbook Club written up in Edible Rhody, co-produced the Rhody Radio podcast as featured in Library Journal, then found herself bookended and burned-out amid the COVID-19 pandemic becoming one of 4.5 million quitters in The Great Resignation. By leaving her job as a public librarian, she committed herself to answering two questions:

“What does it mean to live a whole creative life?”

And, “How do you write a book when you only have the energy to write a fragment of a thought?” 

By age thirty-seven, accepting that chronic burnout had made her life unmanageable and seeking a creative path forward built on real care, this personal shift became her biggest catalyst for growth and creative healing. The daughter of a renowned clockmaker, Faye brings to her work as a coach and a writer a deep knowledge of the mechanism that controls our busy interconnected lives, and a passionate curiosity for restoring the creative body and mind beyond the burnout culture narrative of the patriarchal clock.

In 2024, Faye began serving as a business coach for creative-based business owners and healers with Craft Your Commerce, a program sector of the nonprofit Mountain BizWorks. She was initially brought on the team to lead weekly virtual "creative healing" sessions in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene to artists, arts nonprofit leaders, and creative-based business owners directly impacted by the storm. In 2026, Faye became trained to teach Craft Your Commerce’s “Get Started: Crafting Your Path,” an entrepreneurial basics course for artists and creatives whom she is passionate about serving because she believes that starting your own business is the ultimate act of self-care.

Faye holds an MS in Library and Information Science from Simmons University in Boston, Massachusetts, and a BA in English with minors in American Studies and Art from the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of the indie Substack newsletter Keeping Creative Time where she shares stories and tools of creative regeneration, is an Inward & Artward certified creative facilitator, a certified book editor, and a yoga teacher (RYT-200) who lives among the artists, tourists, trees, and mountains of Asheville, North Carolina, where she can often be found drinking a matcha latte, writing in the margins of her books, and engaging in meaningful conversations with people who care deeply.