About Dina

Dina Paul grew up in New York City and went west young, first to San Francisco and then to Sacramento. At Sacramento State, she discovered social work almost by accident, through an academic minor. She later earned her Master of Social Work at Columbia University.

A retired Licensed Clinical Social Worker, Dina worked for more than thirty years across child welfare, foster care, psychiatric crisis work, emergency departments, medical settings, and nursing homes. Her work involved finding people, assessing them, sitting with them, and recording what could be known. She loved the people more than the systems, the rooms more than the files.

For years Dina ran trainings, classes, and groups for foster parents, staff, clinicians, and patients in New York and North Carolina, and trained police and county social services staff on mental health. Early on, she helped write a grant for a New York program teaching foster parents the mental health needs of the children in their care, led it, and presented the work at a National Association of Social Workers conference. She is a member of NASW and is available to speak to professional and general audiences about care and its ethics, the people who do the work, and the institutions around them.

Dina lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with her husband, Brian, and their poodle; extended family lives nearby. She bakes forty-eight-hour chocolate chip cookies and makes jewelry, a craft she began the year her son was born.

Needlepoints by Gisele Kaufman, Dina’s grandmother. The Room They Gave Me begins in her Central Park West apartment, where Dina lived for seven years. They hang in Dina’s room in Asheville now, with the photograph below.

Moses Kaufman, Dina’s grandfather, followed his father and grandfather into the diamond trade. Dina remembers holding his hand on Fifth Avenue as he pointed out pieces in the Tiffany & Co. windows, set with diamonds he had supplied.