Theresa Brown—Longer Bio

Theresa Brown, PhD, RN, New York Times’ bestselling author of The Shift has a new book: The Cost of Care: How Four Nurses Put Patients First in a Profit-Driven System. It’s a timely and important book on fixing our broken health care system, to be published October 27, 2026, by Algonquin Books. The book is research-based, unlike her earlier memoirs, but Brown’s voice and presence are still central to the story.

Healing: When a Nurse Becomes a Patient, Brown’s third book, won a Nautilus Award (Better Books for a Better World) and was included in the 2022 Gold Foundation Reading List for Compassionate Clinicians. And Brown’s first book, Critical Care: A New Nurse Faces Death, Life, and Everything in Between, is included in curricula in nursing schools around the country.

Brown has been a frequent contributor to the New York Times, writing about nursing and health care. One of her columns for the New York Times “Well” blog earned her an invitation to the White House, where President Obama quoted her in defense of the Affordable Care Act. She presently authors a Substack called “The Healing Newsletter” and writes a monthly column for Cancer Nursing Today. In addition to writing for the New York Times, Brown has also written for CNN.com, The Journal of the American Medical Association, Medscape, Slate.com, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. She has been interviewed on the NPR programs “Fresh Air” and “Here & Now,” and has also appeared on “Hardball,” and MSNBC live.

A native of Missouri, Brown has a PhD in English from the University of Chicago and, in what she calls her past life, 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. It is a career change she has never regretted. She now lives in Pittsburgh, where she works at a Federally-Qualified Health Center delivering primary care.