Ina Albert has been a healthcare communications professional, trainer and workshop leader for more than 30 years. She developed and facilitated workshops and conducted trainings on interpersonal communications to improve patient satisfaction and staff relations and retention at major hospitals in New Jersey, Florida and Illinois. For the past eleven years, she has directed customer service and patient satisfaction programs for a healthcare network in Illinois.

      Ms. Albert has been a healthcare communications consultant for psychiatric hospitals, experiential therapists, alternative practices, nursing homes, and behavioral health organizations. She developed and facilitated workshops for healthcare providers, clinical staff, business groups and individuals in vision management and interpersonal communication skills. More recently, she has been leading Life Transition and Vital Aging workshops for older adults.

      Ms. Albert is a Certified Sage-ing™ Leader for Spiritual Eldering® Institute in Boulder, CO, and for Private Paths, Common Ground, a life transitions workshop created through Midway Center for Creative Imagination in Washington, DC.

      In addition to her work in healthcare communications, she has directed healthcare marketing and public relations programs and has written numerous articles on healthcare communications, patient relations and alternative medicine for major health care publications including Conscious Choice and Strategic Healthcare Marketing Newsletter. Ms. Albert also has published several short stories in Chicago Parent Magazine and Hudson Valley Magazine.

      A graduate of Brandeis University in Waltham, MA, she has completed graduate studies in Foundations of Holistic Health at De Paul University in Chicago.

Author Credits

      Zoe Keithley has a Master of Arts in the Teaching of Writing, is a master teacher candidate and director of the renowned Story Workshop® at Columbia College, Chicago, where she taught fiction for fifteen years. In addition, she served as writing workshop director and archivist for Tell Your Story Project, a celebration of Chicago's sesquicentennial. She now lives, writes and teaches in Northern California.

      Her training in fiction writing at Columbia College, Chicago, and fifteen years on the fiction writing staff there give her a deep writing stratum that is both theoretical and practical. More recently, she has been privately coaching fiction and non-fiction writers. Ms. Keithley inspires creativity and imagination among students in elementary and high school classes, in college and graduate students and among adult learners.

      As a writing specialist for Northeastern Illinois University and Chicago Public Schools, Zoe authored "Image and Reading," a chapter in a collection on reading edited by specialist Jeffrey Wilhelm.

      Since 1983, she has been publishing fiction, non-fiction and poetry in national magazines and through Columbia College and Northeastern Illinois University. Her artistic performances, including prose readings, poetry and music, have been held throughout the Chicagoland area over the past years.

      A prize-winning author in fiction and poetry, Zoe was a finalist in the 2001 Zoetrope All-Story Competition, an Illinois Arts Council Fellow (1997), and a finalist in American Fiction, V.9, 1997. She holds a number of other awards as well. She also is published in prose, including contributing breakthrough research on "Voice" in the Journal of Basic Writing (1992), Crain's Chicago Business (1987) and Conscious Choice (1999).

      Ms. Keithley is a graduate of Trinity College in Washington, D.C.