Melanie Thernstrom is an author and journalist from Boston, MA. She is a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications, and has written three books: The Dead Girl (1990), Halfway Heaven: Diary of a Harvard Murder (1997), and The Pain Chronicles: Cures, Myths, Mysteries, Prayers, Diaries, Brain Scans, Healing, and the Science of Suffering (2010). She has taught creative writing at Harvard University, Cornell University, and in the MFA program at UC Irvine. She currently lives with her husband and children in Palo Alto, CA.
Daphne Merkin is the author of Enchantment, a novel, and Dreaming of Hitler, a collection of essays. Her cultural criticism has appeared in a range of publications, including Vogue and The American Scholar, and has been widely anthologized. She has been a staff writer for The New Yorker and is currently a contributing writer at Elle and The New York Times Magazine. She lives in New York City, where she teaches writing
