Roslyn Bern­stein has been a sto­ry­teller all her life, some­times work­ing for a true account in the nar­row sense as a jour­nal­ist when it’s report­ing or his­to­ry, and some­times in a wider, more res­o­nant sense when com­pos­ing poet­ry, short sto­ries, or a nov­el. As a jour­nal­ist, she has report­ed in-depth cul­tur­al sto­ries for venues includ­ing Guer­ni­ca, Tablet, Arter­ri­to­ry, and Huff­in­g­ton Post. Six­ty of her online pieces were reprint­ed in an anthol­o­gy, Engag­ing Art: Essays and Inter­views From Around the Globe. While report­ing on all forms of art and archi­tec­ture, doc­u­men­tary pho­tog­ra­phy has been a major sub­ject of Bern­stein’s writ­ing and teach­ing since the 1970s.She is the author of a col­lec­tion of linked fic­tion­al tales, Board­walk Sto­ries, set in a sea­side com­mu­ni­ty dur­ing the 1950s, and the co-author with Shael Shapiro of Ille­gal Liv­ing: 80 Woost­er Street and the Evo­lu­tion of SoHo, which focus­es on one build­ing to tell the sto­ry of SoHo’s trans­for­ma­tion from a man­u­fac­tur­ing dis­trict to a live-work arts com­mu­ni­ty. For most of her career, she taught jour­nal­ism and cre­ative writ­ing at Baruch Col­lege, CUNY where she was the found­ing direc­tor of The Sid­ney Har­man Writer-in-Res­i­dence Pro­gram. The Girl Who Count­ed Num­bers was inspired by the sev­en months that Roslyn Bern­stein spent in Jerusalem in 1961. She has tried to be atten­tive to his­tor­i­cal details although the sto­ry of Susan Reich, her fam­i­ly, and friends is fictional.