David Hechler

David Hechler is a writer, editor, and a reporter who has covered the legal beat for many years. He was the Executive Editor of Corporate Counsel magazine, where his reporting, writing, and editing earned top awards from the two major business press associations.

A graduate of Grinnell College, Hechler went on to earn a master’s in teaching from Brown University and taught high school English for seven years. He then completed a second master’s degree at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

His work at Columbia led to his first book, The Battle and the Backlash: The Child Sexual Abuse War, which won critical praise from publications as diverse as The New York Times and the Michigan Law Review. In Good Hands was also incubated at Columbia. He began working on it there as a Prudential Fellow for Children and the News.

In 2017, The American Society of Journalists and Authors awarded In Good Hands first prize for a book of general nonfiction.

Hechler is currently a writer and editor at TAG Infosphere, a research and advisory firm that covers cybersecurity, climate science, and artificial intelligence.

Zak Mucha

Zak Mucha, LCSW, is a psychoanalyst and president of the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis. He spent seven years working as the supervisor of an Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) program, providing 24/7 services to persons suffering from severe psychosis, substance abuse issues, and homelessness.

Mucha has worked as a counselor and consultant for U.S. combat veterans undergoing training for digital forensic investigations in child pornography and is also a board member of the Legislative Drafting Institute for Child Protection. He currently also provides consultation to various mental health agencies in Chicago.

Before going into the clinical field, Mucha has worked as a freelance journalist, truck driver, furniture mover, construction worker, union organizer, staff member at a juvenile DCFS locked unit, and taught briefly at a women’s prison.

He is the author of Emotional Abuse: A Manual for Self-Defense and Swimming to the Horizon: Crack, Psychosis, and Street-Corner Social Work as well as two collections of poetry.

Alice Vachss

Alice Vachss' six-decades-long career includes:

• a VISTA volunteer at New York City’s infamous Rikers Island jail and prison;
• a public defender in Manhattan;
• an attorney for foster children in New York’s Family Court;
• a New York City sex crime prosecutor;
• chief of a NYC Special Victims Bureau;
• a national and international speaker, educator and trainer;
• director of a consultant firm on campus sexual assault response;
• a civil rights legal aid attorney for elderly or abused victims;
• the special prosecutor for sex crimes in a Pacific Northwest county.

The first of Alice Vachss' biographical non-fiction highlighted her years as chief of a Special Victims Bureau in NYC. Published by Random House in 1993, Sex Crimes was promptly named a NY Times Notable Book of the Year. Sex Crimes: Then and Now includes both her original book as well as a sequel detailing her international work and her trials as a special prosecutor for sex crimes in rural America.

Her debut novel, OBaaT (One Bully at a Time), was inspired by her work with teenage women standing up to trauma and their empathetic and loyal friends.

In addition, Alice Vachss has published numerous popular media articles on sexual violence, several research articles and a manual on community response to sex crimes victims who are elderly or who have a disability.

She is also the editor of Pay What It Costs, a small press dedicated to solutions-to-violence literature.