Alissa Hirshfeld grew up in Washington D.C., during the Nixon administration, where she listened to her parents and their circle of liberal friends avidly discuss the issues of the day. From a young age, she wrote poetry and short stories, eventually working as the editor of both her high school literary magazine and newspaper and winning several writing contests and awards.
She went on to study art history and psychology at Harvard University, where her writing was reserved for term papers. After earning her masters in counseling psychology, she wrote academic journal articles for the American Journal of Psychiatry, Creativity Research Journal, and The Therapist Magazine, while also taking interest in the therapeutic use of journaling, both for herself and for her psychotherapy clients.
Now balancing a psychotherapy practice with parenting, she writes when the muse strikes, as it did after the loss of her mother, when she wrote a short memoir, This Whole Wide World is Just a Narrow Bridge, that explored what she learned from her dozen years of working in hospice care, which coincided with the death of her mother, birth of her daughter, and her own near-death experience. More recently, she published her first novel, Living Waters: From Harvard Halls to Sacred Falls, a coming of age story interwoven with a story of grief and loss.
Since the Trump campaign, Alissa has been involved in the Duty to Warn movement, warning about the danger this president presents to the public mental health, and has blogged about the intersection of politics and psychology. These interests led to her collaboration with Amy Roost on this current anthology, Fury: Women’s Lived Experiences During the Trump Era, which she is proud to see published by Pact Press, an imprint of Regal House Publishing.
