About Dr. Dennis Stevens
Dr. Dennis Stevens, a Coast Guard veteran and Columbia-trained artist and educator, is the founder of the Sempergeist Institute and author of The Sacred Descent of the Warrior. His current work centers on Poewell, a generative-AI platform for exploring grief and personal transformation.
Truth, duty, and the stories that bind us.
I’m a U.S. Coast Guard veteran, visual artist, and writer with a Doctor of Education in Art and Art Education from Columbia University’s Teachers College.
I’m the author of Sacred Descent of the Warrior and the founder of the Sempergeist Institute, currently operating as the Conway Cultural Development Corporation, a creative placemaking nonprofit dedicated to healing through art, ritual, storytelling, and narrative exploration.
My current focus is Poewell, a visual narrative system that integrates generative AI, expressive art-making, and structured ritual design to support the processing of grief, trauma, and moral injury. Poewell provides a safe, nonverbal pathway for veterans and individuals navigating profound loss to express, organize, and integrate complex emotions through evolving visual worlds and guided narrative exploration, using methods supported by artificial intelligence as well as facilitating therapeutic digital environments and peer cohort interaction.
Dennis can be reached via: contact @ poewell.com
Example Digital, Narrative Artworks by Dennis Stevens, Ed.D., created via the Poewell platform
Sempergeist Institute
Conway Cultural Development Corporation (EIN 47-5065116), operating as the Sempergeist Institute, creates digital environments where veterans can process trauma through AI-supported visual storytelling and guided practices in peer cohorts.
This approach extends creative practice and placemaking from physical spaces into digital domains. Through AI-generated visual narratives, symbolic progression, and structured ritual design, we create persistent digital environments where geographically distributed communities can process trauma, build coherence from fragmented experience, and engage in shared practices.
Memoir of an Esteemed Dipterian
In Memoir of an Esteemed Dipteran, Dennis Stevens, Ed.D., writes under a nom de guerre, reclaiming Kafka’s “vermin” as a philosopher– the Musca domestica incarnate. I wrote this book as a companion to Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. This modern reflection reimagines Gregor’s name through the eyes of a proud housefly, offering a counterpoint in perspective.
Where Kafka’s human awakens to despair, this Samsa meets transformation with wit, wonder, and celebration, revealing that even the briefest life can find meaning in motion, gratitude, and the sheer act of being. In his brief twenty-two-day existence, the reflective insect, Samsa the Second, confronts danger, desire, and the absurdity of survival, transforming his tiny life into a meditation on freedom, faith, and futility.
Blending memoir, allegory, and philosophy, Memoir of an Esteemed Dipteran offers a poetic, existential mirror to the human condition, one that stands in deliberate juxtaposition to Kafka’s original Gregor Samsa.
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