Roanne Weisman and Barbara Kivowitz in conversation with Lucy Jane Bledsoe

Roanne Weisman is an award-winning medical/science author of seven trade health books published by McGraw-Hill and Harvard Medical School, as well as Health Communications, Inc. Her co-authors include faculty of Harvard Medical School and leading academic medical centers. Her feature stories have appeared in magazines including Prevention, Country Living, Alternative Medicine, and Body and Soul, as well as magazines of Massachusetts General Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, both teaching institutions of Harvard Medical School. She also writes regularly for online health education sites. She is the principal of the Write Way to Health, which provides communications consulting and editorial services to large organizations. Barbara Kivowitz, MSW, is a psychotherapist and health care consultant. She has worked with Stanford Health Care and Medical School, UCSF Cancer Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, Dana Farber Cancer Institute, and other health care organizations, and their patients and family caregivers, to help them understand the benefits of a “relationship-focused” model of care. She is a frequent speaker at clinical and patient/caregiver conferences. She has direct experience helping couples and families living with illness through her work as a therapist and an advisor to a hospice. In addition, she has authored several articles on couples and illness, and on living with pain, one of which was published in Women’s Day and another in the journal of the American Pain Foundation. Her blog about couples and illness has been nominated for best literary and best patient blog. She served on the board of trustees of Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates. She has graduate degrees from Harvard University and Simmons School of Social Work. Lucy Jane Bledsoe is the author of the Evolution of Love and five previous novels, including A Thin Bright Line. Her fiction has won a California Arts Council Fellowship in Literature, an American Library Association Stonewall Award, the Arts & Letters Fiction Prize, a Pushcart nomination, a Yaddo Fellowship, and two National Science Foundation Artists & Writers Fellowships. She’s been a six-time Lambda Literary Award finalist and a two-time Ferro-Grumley Award Finalist. Bledsoe lives in the Bay Area where she spends as much time as possible kayaking in the bay, as well as hiking and cycling in the hills.