Lara Naughton has taught students K-12 as well as adults. As a writer and documentarian, she assists individuals who wish to tell their own stories, and has led writing classes with people who have faced challenging circumstances, including homelessness, domestic violence, HIV/AIDS, wrongful conviction, incarceration, and torture. She is a certified Compassion Cultivation Trainer through the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University, and founder of the Compassion Program at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, LA. Her work has appeared in The Sun, Salon, Guernica, Refinery29, Narratively, and Bustle, among other publications. Her writing also includes the documentary stage play Never Fight A Shark in Water: The Wrongful Conviction of Gregory Brightand memoir The Jaguar Man.