Saturday Sep 20, 2025
5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
POWERHOUSE Arena
28 Adams Street (Corner of Adams & Water Street across from the Archway)
Brooklyn , NY
11201
About the Panel.
Three writers share intimate portraits of caring for – or stepping away from – relatives whose mental illness and dysfunction deeply impacted their lives. They reflect on research, reportage, and the profound insights they each took from traumatic family stories, offering pathways toward empowerment, understanding, and self-care.
A reading and conversation with:
- Eamon Dolan, Executive Editor at Simon & Schuster and author of The Power of Parting: Finding Peace and Freedom through Family Estrangement.
- Meg Kissinger, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of bestselling memoir, While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence.
- Natasha Williams, author of the new 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”
About the Authors.
Eamon Dolan has been a book editor for more than thirty years. He is currently Vice President and Executive Editor at Simon & Schuster. He’s also a professional photographer whose work has been shown at the International Center of Photography and elsewhere. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Psychology Today, Oprah Daily, the Telegraph (UK), and other publications. The Power of Parting is his first book.
Meg Kissinger spent more than two decades traveling across the country to report on America’s broken mental health system for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. She has won dozens of accolades, including two George Polk Awards, the Robert F. Kennedy Award, awards from Investigative Reporters and Editors, and two National Journalism Awards. Kissinger taught investigative reporting at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and is a trainer for the school’s Dart Center on Journalism and Trauma. Her stories on the abysmal living conditions for people with mental illness inspired changes to Wisconsin law and led to the creation of hundreds of new housing units. While You Were Out is her first memoir.
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 Internationals Network for Public Schools, coaching science teachers. She has an MA from the University of Pennsylvania and attended the Bread Loaf School of English and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. The Parts of Him I Kept is Natasha Williams’ debut book. Excerpts and essays have been published in the Bread Loaf Journal, Change Seven, LIT, Memoir Magazine, Onion River Review, Writers Digest, Writers Read, Post Road, and South Dakota Review.