December 16th: Charles Barber and Patricia Volk

Charles Barber is the author of Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry is Medicating a Nation (coming out in paperback in February 2009) and the memoir, Songs from the Black Chair. He was educated at Harvard and Columbia and worked for ten years in New York City shelters for the homeless mentally ill. The title essay of Songs from the Black Chair won a 2006 Pushcart Prize and the book itself received a Connecticut Book Award in 2006. Comfortably Numb was released in 2008 to national media attention, including appearances on The Early Show and Fresh Air. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Nation, and Scientific American Mind, among other publications, and on NPR. He has taught nonfiction writing at Wesleyan University. He is a senior administrator at The Connection, an innovative social services agency, and a lecturer in psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine. He lives in Connecticut with his family.

Patricia Volk's most recent work is the novel, To My Dearest Friends. She has also written the memoir Stuffed, a novel White Light, and two collections of short stories, All It Takes and The Yellow Banana. She has published stories, book reviews, and essays in dozens of magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, New York, The New Yorker, Playboy, and GQ. She was a weekly columnist for New York Newsday, and lives in New York City.