Jessica Anya Blau’s newest novel, Mary Jane, comes out this spring. She is the author of the bestselling The Summer of Naked Swim Parties, and the three other critically acclaimed novels. Her books have been featured on the Today Show, CNN, NPR, and in Vanity Fair, Cosmo, Oprah’s Beach Picks, and other national publications.

MD, an adult and child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, is a Supervising and Training Analyst at the Washington Baltimore Psychoanalytic Institute and The Institute of Contemporary Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She serves on the Editorial Boards of Psychoanalytic Inquiry and Psychoanalysis, Self and Context.  Published papers focus on the female gaze in art and psychoanalysis, the relationship between biography and psychoanalysis, mother/daughter relationships, and maternal responses to childhood disability.

Sylvia Flescher is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in private practice. She trained in psychiatry at Mount Sinai, where she is on faculty, and is a graduate of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. She joined the New Directions Writing Program in 1997. Her essay, Googling for Ghosts: a Meditation on Writer's Block, Mourning and the Holocaust, was published in Psychoanalytic Review in 2012. She is currently at work on a memoir.

Jennifer Swift is a writer who loves to teach students of any age or background, those who are eager as well as those who are wary. Her work is published in The Sun Magazine, and she is currently working on a novel based on her aunt’s experience growing up in Australia during World War II. She has a PhD in English and an MA in Writing.

Elizabeth is the author of Every Root a Branch and three award-winning chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in Agni, The Southern Review, Partisan Review, Carolina Quarterly, and Kenyon Review, among many other journals. She has taught at many universities, as well as at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD. In addition to teaching privately, she has also worked as a poet-in-the-schools for the Maryland State Arts Council since 1994.

As a clinical psychologist, I have provided psychotherapy to adults for 40 years. Prior to beginning a private practice in Washington, D.C., I worked in universities including Virginia Commonwealth University( MCV) with medical, nursing and dental students and American University as Director of Psychological Services. My career has included extensive consultation and therapy on identity, race and gender issues.

A former internist involved in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, I am currently a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in private practice in Washington, DC and on the faculty of the GWUMC Obstetrics and Gynecology Department. I have been an instructor in the New Directions Psychoanalytic Writing Program for over 15 years and am a writer of poems and essays.