Leslie Jamison grew up in Los Angeles. Educated at Harvard College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she has also worked as an innkeeper in California, a schoolteacher in Nicaragua, and an office temp in Manhattan. She is the New York Times bestselling author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams, as well as a novel, The Gin Closet, and the essay collection Make it Scream, Make it Burn. Her work has appeared in Harper's, The Atlantic, Oxford American, Virginia Quarterly Review, and the New York Times Magazine, where she is a contributing writer. She directs the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University.