Biography: Carol Bradley Bursack
Over the span of two decades, author, columnist, consultant, and speaker Carol Bradley Bursack cared for a neighbor and six elderly family members. As a result of this experience, Bursack wrote Minding Our Elders: Caregivers Share Their Personal Stories, a portable support group for caregivers.
Minding Our Elders is used as a college text for gerontology and nursing home administration classes. Bursack’s websites Minding Our Elders and Minding Our Elders blog, include links to helpful agencies, articles rich with information and comfort, links to support groups, and resources for caregiver, boomer, and elder needs. She works as a consultant on aging and caregiving issues.
Bursack’s newspaper column, Minding Our Elders, runs weekly, in print and online. She writes The Candid Caregiver column for HealthCentral.com, contributes to their Alzheimer’s/dementia segment, and is on their Health Advocates Advisory Board. Bursack also moderates a paid forum for Dr. Leslie Kernisan’s website Better Health While Aging. She has contributed to scores of other websites over the last decade, the most frequent being Agingcare.com.
Bursack is often interviewed on national radio shows, including NPR's Talk of the Nation; Senior Solutions, produced by Detroit Area Agency on Aging; and Wisconsin Public Radio. She’s routinely interviewed by newspapers, magazines, and on major websites, including Reader’s Digest (Digital), Next Avenue, Salon.com, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The USA Today Network, Chicago-based Make It Better magazine, The Upside of Aging, Booming Encore, US News &World Report, Market Watch, and more.
Bursack is a member the HealthCentral Advocate Advisory Board and a co-moderator on the Facebook sites USagainstAlzheimers and Caregivers Committed to Wellness, as well as a contributor to Caregivers Companion and Joining the Dots on Alzheimer’s.
Besides authoring Minding Our Elders: Caregivers Share Their Personal Stories, she is a contributing author to Dementia: Frank and Linda's story: New approaches, new understanding, new hope (Lion-Monarch, March 2010), and content editor for Finding Joy in Alzheimer’s: New Hope for Caregivers, by Marie Marley, PhD, and Daniel C. Potts, MD, FAAN (US 2015). Bursack wrote a foreword for the second edition of Wishes To Die For: Advance Care Directives that Grant Caregivers Lasting Peace, by Kevin J. Haselhorst, MD, (US 2015). She is also a contributor to an upcoming anthology edited by Marita Golden titled Love in a Silent Storm to be published by Arcade in 2019.
Bursack is currently working on a book that will include her signature support for caregivers and elders. The book will also delve into the many changes that have occurred in caregiving over the last two decades. She plans to include chapters on living well until we die, death with dignity, with more revealed as the book evolves.