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, he asks it in the therapy room and working with his supervisees. 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.

His path here wasn't a straight line. It began with words: a BA in English and creative writing from Hobart and William Smith Colleges, then two years in the Peace Corps in Târgu Mureș, Romania, where he served as assistant director of an organization serving more than 300 street children — his first sustained education in what people need before change is even possible. An MFA in Creative Writing from George Mason University followed, and in 2005 he founded Our Stories Literary Journal on a then-radical premise: every writer who submitted received real feedback, not a form rejection. He ran it for seventeen years — handling five hundred submissions a quarter, leading a twelve-person editorial team, and interviewing writers including George Saunders, Dorothy Allison, and Richard Bausch — while teaching creative writing everywhere from Bucharest, where a translation fellowship took him to the University of Bucharest, to Seoul to Washington, DC.

​

Then came the turn toward clinical work. He earned his MSW from the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis in 2010, where he was a Needleman Fellowship recipient, trained in a bipolar disorder support clinic, and completed practica at Washington University and Webster University. Alongside and after the degree came nearly twenty years inside higher education: program officer for global education at George Mason, coordinating study-abroad programs for more than 500 students, then his first chapter at Cornell University — six years as Coordinator of Travel Safety and International Crisis Response for Cornell Abroad, supervising the university's response to international student incidents and building its travel-safety infrastructure from the ground up.

​

The therapy room won out. Licensed as an LMSW in 2015, he spent five years as a clinical therapist at Family & Children's Service of Ithaca, carrying a caseload of twenty-five clients a week in integrated community mental health, and became a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in 2021. In 2022 he returned to Cornell for a second chapter — this time at Cornell Health, as a generalist therapist and instructional designer, where he saw twenty to twenty-five students a week, facilitated "Write it OUT," a narrative therapy and creative writing group, and designed four asynchronous psychoeducational workshops extending mental health resources to a campus of more than 25,000. He ended working at Cornell in September of 2026. In 2020 he founded A Key Therapy, the group practice he now leads as clinical director, offering telehealth therapy across New York and Delaware, with New Jersey and Virginia underway. Each turn sharpened the same interest: in identity, story, and the conditions that let people change.

​

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's College of Social Work, he's formalizing that framework into capstone research on how therapists attune — and fail to attune — to their clients; and as a writer, seventeen years at the helm of a literary journal have grown into five published books, among them Elephants and Giraffes and The Seasons from Perry City Road. He has presented on mental health and crisis response at national conferences including OSAC and AIEA, spoken publicly on men's mental health, grief, and resilience, and appeared as a guest on podcasts including The Practice of Therapy. He speaks Spanish and Romanian — souvenirs of the Peace Corps years and the Bucharest fellowship — and lives in Trumansburg, New York.

​

For Lex, therapy, scholarship, and story aren't separate projects. They're the same one, told three ways.