Having suffered through alcoholism, schizophrenia, and cancer, while sustaining a peripatetic career teaching college English, Latin, and Italian, Roberta Payne has firsthand experience with diseases among the deadliest of our times, bringing unique perspective to her work. Payne has accumulated degrees from top universities—a BA in classics from Stanford, an MA in Italian from UCLA, an MA in romance languages from Harvard, and a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Denver—but it is from her personal life that she's gained the knowledge most pertinent to her memoir, "Speaking to My Madness: How I Searched for Myself in Schizophrenia." Roberta makes her home in Denver, Colorado, where she serves on the board of directors of the Mental Health Center of Denver. Her published work includes literary translations from Italian, short stories, and articles on schizophrenia. Her "Outsider Art," or art of the mentally ill, has appeared on the cover of the mental health journal, Schizophrenia Bulletin.