Lingwell didn’t begin as a technology company.It began by listening.
Before there was Lingwell, there was the work.
In 2009, Matthew Leavitt Brown began working with veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan through writing groups in Nashville.
Matthew was a poet and educator whose interests had long centered on language and human experience. But working with people carrying experiences of war brought those questions into a different kind of focus.
Some things were difficult to recount. Others were difficult even to recognize or name. People could know that something had happened to them without yet having language that adequately expressed what it meant.
The writing groups offered a place to begin.
The work grew beyond those early gatherings into shelters, clinics, prisons, hospitals, and other settings where people were navigating trauma, illness, uncertainty, and consequential changes in their lives.
Across these different environments, a question continued to develop:
What becomes possible when someone has more room, and better means, to find words for what they are experiencing?
That question remained long after any individual workshop or program had ended.
It became the foundation for Lingwell.
Years of practice became a deeper body of inquiry.
2009 onward
Writing and language-based work with veterans and people navigating difficult experiences, later extending into healthcare, community, and institutional settings.
Doctoral study
Matthew pursued advanced research into language and its relationship to human experience, therapeutic expression, and trauma.
Creative and public practice
The work continued through poetry, teaching, interdisciplinary art, and projects exploring uncertainty, loss, and meaning.
Development of Lingwell
The application of this body of work to a guided conversation platform, with development through Vanderbilt University’s innovation ecosystem and NSF-supported commercialization activity.
The technology came later.
Lingwell grows from years of work with language and human experience. Technology made a new kind of access possible.
The questions behind Lingwell existed long before the conversational technology that now makes it available.
How do people find language for something they don’t yet understand? What happens when a question helps someone look again? How can reflection become something a person carries into the rest of their life?
These questions shaped a body of work in writing, education, research, and community practice.
Generative AI created a new opportunity to build a responsive tool around that work, not the reason for beginning it.
The technology makes Lingwell available in a new way.
The human work gives it its purpose.
The person behind the work.
Matthew Leavitt Brown, PhD
Founder, Lingwell
Matthew Leavitt Brown is a poet, educator, interdisciplinary artist, and founder of Lingwell and the Center for Linguistic Health.
For more than twenty years, his work has explored how language shapes understanding and communication, through university teaching, community writing programs, medical humanities, trauma-related practice, and public art.
He is the author of three collections of poetry and creator of Stations, an interdisciplinary project combining poetry, photography, sound, and public engagement. He has also served as Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
Lingwell brings that long-standing inquiry into a new form: a guided conversation platform designed to help people work through what matters and find language they can use.
A broader effort.
Lingwell’s development also draws on people working across healthcare, organizational leadership, finance, product development, technology, and communications.
What we’re working toward.
Help people find their words.
Make guided reflection and expression more available, so people have better opportunities to understand their experiences and communicate what matters.
A world where more people can say what they mean.
A world in which language is less often a barrier to understanding ourselves, being understood by others, and participating meaningfully in our care, relationships, and decisions.
Keep the person at the center.
As Lingwell develops, we will continue to treat the individual’s own language, judgment, and agency as essential, and make room for the questions, limitations, and responsibilities that come with building this kind of tool.
See what the work has become.
Explore Lingwell for yourself, or see how it might fit the people and communities you serve.