ALYSSA HARAD is a freelance writer and facilitator living in Austin, Texas.  She has published essays on young girls and feminism, her work at a psychiatric hospital, pedagogy and trauma, and her unsuspecting family in Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century, Pissed Off: Women and Anger, The Austin Project and the Barnard College journal Scholar and Feminist.  Before moving to Austin, she worked as a creative arts therapist and journalist in Boise, Idaho, where she received an Idaho State Press Association award for a story on censorship and gay rights in the schools. 

Alyssa read her first perfume review on a blog in 2006.  After a transformative year of sniffing, reading, and collecting, she became a contributor to Perfume Smellin' Things.  She is currently at work on a memoir, to be published by Viking in 2011, that will tell the story of how she became a bride and a perfume fan in one strange and surprisingly wonderful year.