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 NewYork Times bestselling author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams, as well as a novel, The Gin Closet. 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.