Cathy Alter’s articles and essays have appeared in the O, the Oprah Magazine, The Cut, WIRED, Martha Stewart Living, and The Washington Post. She is the author of Virgin Territory: Stories From the Road to Womanhood, the memoir, Up for Renewal: What Magazines Taught Me About Love, Sex, and Starting Over, and CRUSH: Writers Reflect on Love, Longing, and the Lasting Power of Their First Celebrity Crush.

Sharon Alperovitz, LICSW, Teaching Psychoanalyst, Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis, Long-Term Writing Group Co-Chair, New Directions in Psychoanalysis, Faculty, Washington School of Psychiatry, Infant and Young Child Observation Program.

Meghan Adler honed her craft at The Writers Studio in NYC. Her poetry has appeared in Alimentum, California Quarterly, Gastronomica, The Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, and The North American Review. Her first book of poetry, Pomegranate was recently published with Main Street Rag Press. When not writing or teaching poetry, she teaches literacy strategies to educators and collaborates with neuropsychologists to develop learning plans and implement instruction for students with learning differences.

Devra B. Adelstein is a clinical social worker and child psychoanalyst who practices in Cleveland, Ohio. She works with children, adolescents, adults and families and consults with area schools and clinicians. Ms. Adelstein is on the faculty of the Hanna Perkins Center and the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Center where she teaches child development and psychoanalytic writing and supervises candidates. She is a graduate of the New Directions Writing Program.

Anne Adelman is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst with the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis and at the Contemporary Freudian Society. She is the co-editor of JAPA Review of Books, as well as co-author and editor of several articles and three books. She is a co-chair of the New Directions Writing Program and maintains a private practice, currently virtually, in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

Cynthia Ezell is a psychotherapist, farmer, ad writer. Her literary work emerges from the intersection of human relatedness and the environment, reflecting an intimate relationship with land and place. Her work has appeared in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Wordpeace, The Minnow Literary Magazine, Deep Wild Journal, and Wineskins.

Rachel Jadkowski is a Clinical Psychologist practicing in the Green Mountains of Vermont. Currently she sees clients over zoom, as well as outdoors while hiking, skiing, and snowshoeing. Rachel is attuned to her clients’ relationships not only with themselves and other people, but with the more-than-human world of the Wild. She enjoys working with other writers and exploring all clients’ creativity as an essential part of being human.

Liisa Ogburn, who has written for the New York Times, Runner's World, Academic Medicine, and others, previously taught physicians and residents how to tell patient stories in a program she founded at Duke University (http://www.documentingmedicine.com/). She currently writes on aging for WRAL (https://www.wral.com/agingwell) and runs an elder consultancy (https://agingadvisorsnc.com/), as well as speaks widely. She and her son published "Looking for Heroes: One Boy, One Year, 100 Letters" in 2016.

Jeanne Lemkau practices clinical psychology in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She is Professor Emerita of Boonshoft School of Medicine of Wright State University where she taught behavioral science for 25 years. She earned her MFA in creative nonfiction in her fifties and enjoys writing and coaching the writing of others. She has authored numerous academic publications as well as a memoir, Lost and Found in Cuba: A Tale of Midlife Rebellion.

Molly Donovan began her relationship with New Directions in 1998. A clinical psychologist, she has practiced psychotherapy in Washington, DC, for over 40 years, working with individuals, couples and groups. She currently serves on the faculties of the Washington School of Psychiatry, the Professional Psychology Program at GW University, and the Institute of Contemporary Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She has published professionally and finds journal writing a beneficial exercise.

Natalie X. Korytnyk, PhD is a clinical psychologist in private practice in downtown Washington, DC providing individual and couples psychotherapy.  Formerly an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at George Washington University Medical School, she has also been the Chief Psychologist of Inpatient Psychiatry at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and on staff at the National Rehabilitation Hospital. She is an alumna of the WBPC New Directions Writing Program.

Tarpley Long is a Teaching Analyst at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis. She is the Editor of Psychbytes, a monthly publication of short essays on psychoanalytic thinking in everyday life. She has been a small group leader in the New Directions program of the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis. Her Letters to the Editor have been published in The Washington Post and The New Yorker magazine.

Sara Mansfield Taber is a writer, social worker, and developmental psychologist. She is author of the award-winning Born Under an Assumed Name: The Memoir of a Cold War Spy’s Daughter, the writer’s guide Chance Particulars: A Writer’s Field Notebook, books of narrative journalism, and essays published by The Washington Post and The American Scholar. She offers individual therapy and literary coaching, and leads writing workshops for memoirists and health professionals.

Mary Carpenter is a DC-based freelance writer, leading creative writing workshops at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Md., the DC jail and elsewhere. She has written two middle-grade biographies, including “Rescued by a Cow and a Squeeze” about Temple Grandin. For more than 30 years, Mary reported on medicine for magazines and websites. She has an M.S. journalism degree from Boston University and an English Literature B.A. from Wellesley College.

Michelle Brafman is a writer and teacher. She is currently on the faculty of New Directions and the Johns Hopkins MA in Writing program where she received the 2019 Excellence in Teaching Award. She is also the author of the novel Washing the Dead and Bertrand Court: Stories and has been invited to speak to more than 160 audiences about both her work and the creative process.

Melanie S. Hatter is an award-winning author of two novels and one short story collection. Selected by Edwidge Danticat, Malawi’s Sisters won the inaugural Kimbilio National Fiction Prize, published by Four Way Books in 2019. The Color of My Soul won the 2011 Washington Writers’ Publishing House Fiction Prize, and Let No One Weep for Me, Stories of Love and Loss was released in 2015. Melanie received a master’s in writing from Johns Hopkins University.

Alison Hicks is the author of two poetry collections, a poetry chapbook, a novella, and an anthology. Her forthcoming collection is winner of the 2021 Birdy Prize from Meadowlark Books. Her work has been named a finalist for the Beullah Rose Prize from Smartish Pace, and has appeared in Eclipse, Gargoyle, Permafrost, and Poet Lore, among other journals. She is founder of Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio, which offers community-based writing workshops.

Dana Cann is the author of the novel Ghosts of Bergen County (Tin House). His short stories have been published in The Sun, The Massachusetts Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Florida Review, and elsewhere. He’s received fellowships from the Maryland State Arts Council, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, and the Sewanee Writers Conference. He teaches for Johns Hopkins University and The Writer’s Center.

Tara Campbell is a writer, teacher, Kimbilio Fellow, and fiction editor at Barrelhouse. She received her MFA from American University. She's the author of a novel, TreeVolution, and four collections: Circe's Bicycle, Midnight at the Organporium, and Political AF: A Rage Collection, and Cabinet of Wrath: A Doll Collection. She teaches creative writing at American University, the Writer's Center, Politics and Prose, Barrelhouse, and the National Gallery of Art's Writing Salon.

Caroline Bock is the author of CARRY HER HOME, winner of the 2018 Fiction Award from the Washington Writers' Publishing House, and the critically young adult novels: LIE and BEFORE MY EYES from St. Martin's Press. In 2021, she co-edited THIS IS WHAT AMERICA LOOKS LIKE: poetry and fiction from DC, Maryland and Virginia for The Washington Writers Publishing House, which features 100 writers and 111 of their works on the creative state of our Union. Find her often on Twitter @cabockwrites.