Lex E. Santí has spent two decades chasing one question from every angle: what actually helps a person change? As founder and clinical director of A Key Therapy, and a generalist therapist at Cornell Health, he asks it in the therapy room. As a writer, editor, and DSW candidate, he asks it on the page and in the research literature — treating clinical work, scholarship, and storytelling as one inquiry, not three separate careers.

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His path here wasn't a straight line. He served in the Peace Corps in Romania, worked in clinical roles including Family & Children's Service, spent seventeen years editing a literary journal, and earned an MFA in Creative Writing from George Mason University before becoming a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in 2021. Each turn sharpened the same interest — in identity, story, and the conditions that let people change.

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That throughline runs through three overlapping bodies of work today: as a clinician, he built the Acceptance & Motivation Inquiry (AMI) framework that now shapes his own practice; as a DSW candidate at the University of Kentucky, he's formalizing that framework into research; and as a writer, seventeen years at the helm of a literary journal have grown into five published books. For Lex, therapy, scholarship, and story aren't separate projects. They're the same one, told three ways.