Theresa Brown

Theresa Brown, PhD, RN, is author of Healing: When a Nurse Becomes a Patient. She also wrote the New York Times bestseller The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients’ Lives.

Brown is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, where she writes about nursing and health care. Her Opinion series, “Bedside,” examined health care from a nurse’s point of view. One of her columns for the New York Times “Well” blog earned Brown an invitation to the White House, where President Obama quoted her in defense of the Affordable Care Act.

Brown has written for CNN.com, The Journal of the American Medical Association, Slate.com,and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Her quarterly column in The American Journal of Nursing called “What I’m Reading” discusses books of interest to nurses. She has been interviewed on the NPR program “Fresh Air” and has appeared on “Hardball,” “20/20” and NPR’s Talk of the Nation. She speaks nationally on topics relating to nursing, health care and end of life.

Both The Shift,which portrays one real shift worked by a hospital nurse, and her first book, Critical Care: A New Nurse Faces Death, Life, and Everything in Between, which chronicles Brown’s first year of nursing, are used as text-books at Schools of Nursing around the country.

A native of Missouri, Brown has a PhD in English from the University of Chicago and taught English for three years at Tufts University. She stayed home with her three children after working at Tufts and was inspired by them to return to school and become a nurse.

She tweets from @TheresaBrown.