Vivian Conan is a writer, librarian, and IT business analyst who lives in Manhattan. A native New Yorker, she grew up in a large Greek-Jewish clan in Brooklyn, received a bachelor’s degree from Brooklyn College, and holds master’s degrees from Pratt Institute and Baruch College. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, New York magazine, Lilith, Narratively, and Ducts.org. She received a 2007 fellowship in Nonfiction Literature from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a 2019 Simon Rockower Award from the American Jewish Press Association. Vivian sings with the Peace of Heart Choir, which performs free for communities in need, and has mentored teenage writers as a volunteer with Girls Write Now. Losing the Atmosphere is her first book.

Andrew Bell is a clinical psychologist with a Ph.D from Columbia University and an MA from NYU. His focus as always been on children, families and community mental health. He started out as a psychiatric aide and homeless outreach worker, and later worked as an inpatient psychologist, outpatient therapist, ER psychologist, and director of North Central Bronx Hospital’s child psychiatric ER. In 2005, he co-founded and directed the mental health component of the Safe Schools Successful Students Initiative, which served 12 very high-need Bronx middle and elementary schools. For nine years he served as the Program Director of Children’s Mental Health at Westchester County’s Department of Community Mental Health. His current role focuses on promoting trauma-informed systems transformation throughout Westchester’s system of care. He has published peer-reviewed research on dreams, personality disorders, and public health strategies to avert psychiatric ER visits and hospitalizations. He received the Family Ties’ Champion of Children award in 2014 and was recognized in 2015 by Fordham University’s Children and Families Institute for Research, Support, and Training.

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