Kay Redfield Jamison is the Dalio Professor in Mood Disorders, Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and co–director of the Johns Hopkins Mood Disorders Center. She is also Honorary Professor of English at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She is co–author of the standard medical text on manic–depressive (bipolar) illness, which was chosen as the most outstanding book in biomedical sciences by the American Association of Publishers, and author of Touched with Fire, An Unquiet Mind, Night Falls Fast, Exuberance, and Nothing Was the Same. 

Dr. Jamison has written more than 125 scientific and clinical articles about mood disorders, suicide, creativity, and lithium. Her memoir, An Unquiet Mind, which chronicles her own experience with manic–depressive, or bipolar illness, was on The New York Times bestseller list for five months and translated into thirty languages. Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide was a national bestseller and selected by The New York Times as a Notable Book of 1999. 

Jamison has been awarded numerous honorary degrees, including from the University of St. Andrews(Literature), Brown University (Medical Sciences), and the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church (Divinity). She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and the recipient of numerous literary and scientific awards, including the Lewis Thomas Prize, the Sarnat Prize from the National Academy of Medicine, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Her book about Robert Lowell, Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire, was a 2018 Pulitzer Prize Finalist.

Dr. Jamison receives royalties from Alfred A. Knopf and Vintage.