Rivka Galchen received her MD with a focus in psychiatry from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. She recently completed her master of fine arts at Columbia University, where she was a Robert Bingham Fellow. She has published essays in The Believer and Scientific American, and in 2006 she was awarded a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Atmospheric Disturbances is her first novel and will be published in Canada, the U.S., Europe and Asia. Rivka Galchen was born in Toronto and now lives in New York City. Visit her at www.galchen.net.