Have we broken the silence? Through intimate family portraits of love and resilience, each author shows the power of telling our stories and shares the burden and privilege of families living with mental illness. Dr. Leslie Pereira will facilitate a reading and conversation with Author Meg Kissinger, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of best-selling memoir, “While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence,” and Natasha Williams, author of her memoir "The Parts of Him I Kept: The Gifts of My Father’s Madness," praised by James Lasdun as “an extraordinary memoir of growing up with a schizophrenic father…funny, wise, beautifully observed and astonishingly tender.”

Natasha Williams has worked as an adjunct biology professor at SUNY Ulster in the Hudson Valley of New York and as a consultant for the International Public-School Network, coaching science teachers. She has an MA from the University of Pennsylvania. In the summer of 2020, she continued working on the manuscript summers at the Bread Loaf School of English and at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in 2023. Excerpts of The Parts of Him I Kept, forthcoming April 2025 from Apprentice House Press, have been published in the Bread Loaf Journal, Change Seven, LIT, Memoir Magazine, Onion River Review, Writers Read, Post Road, and South Dakota.
Meg Kissinger, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and author, will help you see and think about people with mental illness in a new light. Her best-selling memoir, “While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence,” has been praised for its incisive reporting, boundless compassion and surprising humor. It was named as an Outstanding Work of Literature winner and an editors’ choice by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Amazon, Goodreads and Independent Booksellers Association. Audible chose it as the Best of the Year. Kissinger spent more than two decades traveling across the country for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel to report on our nation’s failed mental health system, winning more than a dozen national honors, including two George Polk Awards and the Robert F. Kennedy National Journalism Award. She taught investigative reporting at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and is a trainer for the school’s Dart Center on Trauma and Journalism. Kissinger lives in Milwaukee, Wis., with her husband, Larry, near the shores of Lake Michigan, her favorite place to plunge, even on the coldest day in January.
Dr Leslie Pereira has been a licensed clinical social worker for over 3 decades. Her work has spanned the fields of Community Mental Health, Women's Health, Academia, and the Workplace. In addition to her direct practice experience as a therapist, she has worked as a clinical social work educator and supervisor at the Schools of Social Work at Columbia University and Adelphi University. She is a former NIMH Research Fellow. She currently works as an Employee Assistance Program Specialist providing counseling, training, and management consulting to employees and organizations across New York’s Mid-Hudson Valley, and leads a monthly Leadership Seminar, "Conversations in Resonant Leadership" for managers and supervisors.

*Georgie D’Avanzo, Outreach & Development Associate from NAMI (National Association of Mental Illness) Westchester will be onsite with information and to answer questions.