Jacob M. Appel is currently Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Education at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, where he is Director of Ethics Education in Psychiatry, Assistant Director of the Academy for Medicine and the Humanities, and Medical Director of the Mental Health Clinic at the East Harlem Health Outreach Program. He also teaches graduate students at Albany Medical College's Alden March Bioethics Institute. Prior to joining the faculty at Mount Sinai, Jacob taught most recently at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and at Yeshiva College, where he was the writer-in-residence. In his non-psychiatric life, Jacob is the author of five literary novels, ten short story collections, an essay collection, a cozy mystery, a thriller, a previous volume of poems and a compendium of dilemmas in medical ethics. He is Vice President of the National Book Critics Circle, co-chair of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry's Committee on Psychiatry & Law, a board member of the Bellevue Literary Review and a Councilor of the New York County Psychiatric Society.