Author Bios

Linda Garcia, MA, CCLS, is a Certified Child Life Specialist with extensive experience providing therapeutic interventions with traumatized, abused, chronically ill, and burn injured children. Her expertise includes indi­vidual and group therapeutic play, crisis intervention, grief and mourning counseling, and family assessment and treatment. She is a consultant to ICAN/NCFR (National Center on Child Fatality Review), Founder and Presi­dent of the CACLP (California Association of Child Life Professionals), and a member of Child Life Council. She has conducted local, national, and international presentations on the topics of child life, grief and loss, cultural awareness, and family violence. Ms. Garcia was a Child Life Specialist at the UCLA Medical Center and the Grossman Burn Center, and Manager of Child Development Services at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles. Cur­rently, is part-time faculty at (CSUN) California State University, Northridge and USC School of Social Work.

Michael Durfee, MD, is a child psychiatrist who retired after 34 years with the LA County Department of Health.
He has held appointments at the USC School of Medicine and is a Visiting Scholar in Public Health at UCLA. Dr. Durfee developed county wide child abuse prevention programs in Mental Health and created Child Death Review in 1978 that expanded internationally. He co-founded the ICAN Grief Group to address the needs of children and families and works to develop a model program in LA County and inspires similar programs nationally. His work with child death review and grief is available on the web page for the ICAN National Center on Child Fatality Review, www.ican-ncfr.org. He can be reached at michaeld55@aol.com.