I grew up in a farming community in northwest Missouri. My family and I live in upstate New York in the Hudson Valley and it has been our home for more than four decades. I retired from a busy clinical practice in Rhinebeck, New York after 36 years in June of 2013. I've served as Clinical Director of three Residential Treatment Programs during my career: the Rhinebeck Country School, Astor Home for Children, and currently I am the Clinical Director of the Children's Home of Poughkeepsie. I am also a Faculty Associate at Johns Hopkins University. My most popular book is Bereavement: Counseling the Grieving over the Life Cycle. The second most popular book is Evocative Strategies in Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy that contains over 150 practical strategies I've developed to engage extremely challenging and sometimes oppositional children and adolescents. The third most popular book is Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy: Wounded Spirits and Healing Paths. That book is my personal favorite and contains chapters by me and others written with some of my most admired colleagues including James Garbarino, Kenneth Hardy, and Andy Fussner. It contains anecdotes about some of the people who have inspired me and taught me things that textbooks can never provide such as the late Olga Silverstein, an amazing family therapist for many years at the Ackerman Institute for the Family, and the late Walter Bonime, M.D., a Senior Training Psychoanalyst at New York Medical College who provided me psychoanalytic supervision for over 14 years.I was thrilled to recently co-edit a new book with the acclaimed and internationally known art therapist, Cathy Malchiodi, Ph.D., Creative Arts and Play Therapy for Problems of Attachment, which is the first book in a new series that Cathy and I will be editing for Guilford Press. The series is called "Creative Arts and Play Therapy." The first book contains exciting chapters by Rick Gaskill and Bruce Perry on the latest findings from neuroscience as applied to play therapy and chapters by leading practitioners in the field of art, dance, drama, and music therapy as well as recognized leaders in the field of play therapy such as Eliana Gil, Jennifer Baggerly, Phyllis Booth, addressing a wide range of attachment problems.