Mapping the Mind: Conversations on Creative Writing in Healthcare
Mapping the Mind — part of BLR’s Conversations on Creative Writing in Healthcare series — brings together four best-selling authors for a dynamic conversation about writing the inner life. Focusing on memoirs of mental illness, neurologic disease, and psychological healing, this event explores how writers give language to experiences that are often hidden, misunderstood, or stigmatized. Through discussion of craft, literary style, and lived experience, these authors will examine how storytelling can make the invisible visible—and immensely readable!
This event is free and open to the public.
This is a live event, but please RSVP even if you can’t make it, as the discussion will be recorded and we will send you a link to watch later.
About the Panelists
Susannah Cahalan is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Brain on Fire, which has sold over a million copies and has been translated into more than twenty languages. Her second book, The Great Pretender, was shortlisted for the Royal Society’s 2020 Science Book Prize. Her most recent book is The Acid Queen, a biography of Rosemary Woodruff Leary, a hidden voice of the American counterculture movement.
susannahcahalan.com
Damon Tweedy is a professor of psychiatry at Duke University School of Medicine and staff physician at the Durham Veteran Affairs Health System. He is a former nonfiction editor of Bellevue Literary Review. His book, Black Man in a White Coat, was a New York Times Bestseller, selected by TIME magazine as one of the Top 10 Nonfiction books of 2015. His most recent book is Facing the Unseen: The Struggle to Center Mental Health in Medicine. damontweedy.com
Sarah LaBrie is a TV writer and the author of No One Gets to Fall Apart, a New York Times Editors’ Pick and Notable Book of the Year. She has written on television series including Minx, Blindspotting, Made for Love, and Love, Victor. LaBrie has also written for The Guardian, Guernica, Joyland, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Electric Literature. Her libretti have been performed at Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Apollo Theater. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, the Ucross Foundation, Yaddo, Sewanee, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She was nominated for Best Television Comedy Script at the 2024 Women’s Image Network Awards for her work on Blindspotting. sarahlabrielivesinlosangeles.com
About the Moderator
Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD, is the editor-in-chief of BLR. In her day job, she is a primary care doctor at Bellevue Hospital and a clinical professor of medicine at NYU. She is a contributor to The New Yorker, the New York Times and The Atlantic, and is a recent Guggenheim fellow. She is the author of six books, most recently When We Do Harm.