Gail Albert is a writer, licensed psychologist, photographer, and certified teacher of Jewish mystical and meditative practice. She received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University. For most of the 1990s, she directed a program in New York City that brought psychiatrists to mentally ill homeless people; currently, she has a private practice in Woodstock, New York. Her first book, Matters of Chance, was a Book-of-the-Month Club Alternate Selection and was nominated as the Best First Novel of the Year for the American Book Awards. Her second book is called The Other Side of the Couch. One of its chapters was republished in a book for the general public on psychotherapy (Inside Therapy: Illuminating Writing About Therapists, Patients, and Psychotherapy), which includes chapters by such people as Erich Fromm, Theodore Reik, Janet Malcolm, Mark Epstein, and Irvin Yalom. Her third book, Mending the Heart, Tending the Soul: Directions to the Garden Within, was published in 2012.