Ingrid Andersson is a writer whose debut collection, Jordemoder: Poems of a Midwife (Holy Cow! Press, 2022) was short-listed as best book of poetry for 2023 by the Wisconsin Library Association and won 2nd place in the Edna Meudt book award. Andersson’s poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net, selected as poem-of-the-month (Mom Egg Review) and for an Editor’s Choice award (Eastern Iowa Review). Her work has appeared in About Place Journal, ArsMedica, Intima, Literary Mama, Midwest Review, Midwifery Today, Plant-Human Quarterly, Wisconsin People & Ideas, and elsewhere. Andersson has practiced as a home birth nurse midwife and healthcare activist in Madison, Wisconsin for more than 20 years. Learn more about her work at https://www.ingridandersson.info/

Laura Carmen Arena is an Argentinian-American writer and visual artist and an experienced yoga and meditation teacher based in Cambridge. She has led workshops on meditation and yoga at universities and other professional settings and her photography has appeared in local and international outlets. She studied literature at New York University, and contemplative traditions, education and creative writing at Harvard University, where she also served as a teaching fellow, photographer, web master and assistant director of multicultural affairs.

Madeleine Avirov is a visual artist. She is also the sole caregiver for her husband, who suffered a massive ischemic stroke in 2018. The drawings included here were done in the last days of her mother’s life with the materials at hand. When her mother could no longer speak, the artist could only draw. She returned to her first language.

Leon Axel is a diagnostic radiologist at New York University Grossman School of Medicine. Although his technical and clinical background helped him understand what was going on while undergoing radiation therapy, he experienced it very much as just a patient.

Teva Brender is a second-year internal medicine resident at the University of California, San Francisco. He graduated from Oregon Health & Science University School of Medicine in 2022. His clinical interests are in hospital, pulmonology and critical care medicine. His other interests include physician advocacy, moral distress and narrative medicine. His writing has appeared in The Oregonian, Academic Medicine, The Journal of General Internal Medicine, and JAMA Internal Medicine. Outside of the hospital, he enjoys cooking, rock climbing and spending time with his wife and their miniature dachshund Winston.

Jose A. Bufill is a medical oncologist in full time clinical practice for 30 years in South Bend, Indiana. For about 10 years, he served as director of medical education at his local hospital. Born in Havana, Cuba to a college professor father and a librarian mother, he is convinced that neglect of the humanities impoverishes the practice of medicine. He likes to listen to his patients, to write and to paint in oils. Find out more about his work at buroakfoundation.org

Lynne Byler is a poet and cancer patient (mantle cell lymphoma) in remission. She worked for decades at an investment firm and was able to retire early. She now tutors inmates for the high school equivalency exam and runs a writing workshop at a local food pantry.

Phyllis Capello, who is a writer and musician, is a NYFA fellow in fiction I and a winner of an Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award. Her collection Packs Small Plays Big is from Bordighera Press, 2018. Cantastoria work (sing/storyteller) has taken her from Ireland-to-Istanbul. She has presented at the International Oral History Conference in Rome, Italy and has been a musician/clown since 1990 with Healthy Humor Red Nose Docs, as well as a member of the poetry/activist trio, The Ferlinghetti Girls. ferlinghettigirls.com In 2023 she was honored with People’s Hall of Fame Award for teaching artistry for her work in New York City schools.

Susan Carlson lives and works in southeastern Michigan. Her work has appeared in various journals including Passager, River Heron Review, Gyroscope Review, Typishly and Persimmon Tree. Carlson has received a Best of the Net nomination.

Colleen Cavanaugh, MD has been in private practice for 30 years. She graduated for Warren Alpert School of Medicine, Brown University. Colleen has been writing mainly literary non-fiction including memoir essays and narrative medicine for four years.

Simran Chand is a second-year medical student at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians & Surgeons. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Biology and Gender, Sexuality, & Women's Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 2021. Chand enjoys writing as a form of reflection in order to more deeply empathize with her patients, to appreciate the privilege of learning another's story, and to inform the values she hopes to reflect in her future as a clinician.

Mitali Chaudhary is a second-year Internal Medicine resident at the University of Toronto. Her current interests include research on the intersection between teaching and advocacy, and hunting for the best almond croissant in the city.

Medha Cherabuddi was born and brought up in San Jose, California, and moved to Hyderabad, India, with her family at nine. After growing up with the best of both worlds, she completed medical school in India and moved to Detroit, Michigan, during the peak of the pandemic to begin her Internal Medicine residency at Henry Ford Hospital.

Angela Cooke-Jackson is a college professor, health consultant and artist. Her expertise is in Health Communication and Behavioral Science. She uses community-based participatory research and media literacy to help communities curate and design innovative, practical applications for sustainable change. She is also the co-director of the Intimate Communication Lab (intimatecommlab.org). She envisions her research at the nexus of culture, health disparities and marginalized populations. Her current scholarship incorporates intimacy and reproductive health to advance agency among underserved and marginalized people of color and gender minorities

William Doan, PhD is a past president of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and a Fellow in the College of Fellows of The American Theatre. Doan has co-authored three books, several plays, and collaborated on three animated short films. Current work includes the performance piece, Inhale, Exhale, Draw, part of his larger My Anxiety Project, which includes multiple short graphic narratives published in the Annals of Internal Medicine/Graphic Medicine and Cleaver Magazine, lntima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine and The AutoEthnographer. He is a Professor of Theatre in the College of Arts and Architecture, and Director of the Arts and Design Research Incubator at Penn State. Doan served as the Penn State Laureate for 2019-2020.

Anna Dovre is a second-year resident in Family Medicine. She lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota with her partner and dog, where she likes to read speculative fiction, attempts to cross-stitch and admires chickadees from her porch.

Bernadine Guimary is an Emergency Medicine research associate, patient sitter and aspiring physician. As the daughter of two registered nurses, one of whom is a pastor, from the Philippines, Guimary has seen many perspectives of healthcare. After a long day of studying for the MCAT, working at the hospital and/or volunteering at church, she draws the stories and images bubbling up in her brain throughout the day. Her love of art comes in handy when bonding with patients, who seek ways to distract themselves from the hospital setting. She hopes to connect with more people through comics and illustrations by relaying the emotional reality of patients and those who provide patient care. Discover more: @bernadine_guimary_art

Sarah Gundle has a doctorate in Clinical Psychology and a master’s degree in International Affairs. In addition to her private practice, she is an Assistant Professor at the Icahn School of Medicine, Mount Sinai Medical Center. She is writing a book about breakups.

Susan Hall is a high school English teacher, who lives on the eroding bluffs of Lake Michigan, where she engages daily with the rhythm and beauty of words. Her essays about her son and his epilepsy have appeared in Newsweek, The New York Times, Insider and elsewhere.

Zachary G. Jacobs is a physician (hospitalist) in Portland, Oregon, who was drawn to a career in healthcare by the stories. He writes and creates art in order to reflect on his experiences as a doctor. For more: https://zgjmd.wordpress.com

Asha Jina is a third-year medical student at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio. She plans to pursue a career in internal medicine.
POETRY: On Doctoring

Laura Johnsrude is a retired pediatrician living in Louisville, Kentucky. Her essays have been published or are forthcoming in Fourth Genre, Bellevue Literary Review, River Teeth, Hippocampus, The Spectacle, Please See Me, Minerva Rising, Drunk Monkeys, Under the Gum Tree, The Examined Life Journal, Sweet: A Literary Confection, The Boom Project anthology, and on Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog. Johnsrude’s piece, “Drawing Blood,” won Honorable Mention for Bellevue Literary Review’s spring 2018 Fel Felice Buckvar Prize for Nonfiction. Her book reviews have been published in Good River Review.

Maya Klauber is a visual artist and emerging poet living in New York City. After earning a B.A. in creative writing from Colby College in 2008, her first poem was published in The Café Review. She went on to earn a Master of Social Work (MSW) from Columbia University in 2012, while coping with chronic health issues—experiences that have informed and deepened her empathy and style of writing. Klauber resides on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with her beloved husband and rescue pup. Her poems will appear in “Green Ink Poetry,” "Last Leaves Magazine" and "tiny wren lit."

Bessie Liu is a third-year medical student at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She hopes to eventually work in either primary care or psychiatry, and her interests include narrative medicine and cultural humility. Her poetry has been featured in the Journal of Medical Humanities.

Denise Napoli Long is a student in the MA in Writing program at Johns Hopkins University. She has previously been published in Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, as well as Write or Die magazine. She is an ER nurse, a home hospice nurse, a volunteer EMT and a mother.

Hannah May is a second-year medical student at Yale School of Medicine. She graduated with a bachelor's degree in English from Columbia University. She lives in Connecticut with her husband and daughter.

Deborah Meltvedt is a writer and public health educator in Sacramento, California. She has taught Health Science to young people in both high schools and clinical settings and loves blending creative writing with science and medicine. Her work has been published in various literary and medical anthologies and her first chapbook of poetry Becoming a Woman was published by The Poetry Box in 2021.

Kimberly Mitchell was born and raised in Newfoundland, Canada, where she developed a love of teaching through storytelling. She is a strong indigenous woman who is a mother, daughter, sister, wife and friend. Now studying medicine at Queen’s University, Mitchell is grateful to all those who have taught her the wondrous beauty of life and the great privilege it is to be present with someone in their death.

Zeina Moukarzel is a retired anesthesiologist, critical care physician and a former chief of ICU and Burn center. Mourkarzel holds a Master in Healthcare management, a Master in Public Health and a diploma in Addiction Medicine. She is also interested in Lifestyle Medicine and Health Promotion and is the founder and president of LAMSA (NGO). Find out more at lamsaleb.org and drzeinamoukarzel.com

Lisa Napolitan is married to a brilliant, selfless woman who supports her writing habit; they have two awesome college kids. Her work has appeared in various journals. Her short story, “Destrehan,” which was published by Into the Void, was nominated to Best Small Fictions. She serves on the Board and Conference Committee of Women Who Write, Inc., a non-profit supporting women writers at all stages of their careers. She holds a BA in Semiotics from Brown, an MFA with Distinction in Creative Writing from Hofstra and is working toward her doctorate in writing and literary studies at Drew University. She credits her brilliant mother for inspiring her as a writer. Find out more about her work at lisanapolitan.com and on Twitter @4amwriterlisa.

Elizabeth Osmond is a UK-based consultant neonatologist and a poet. In 2021 she won third prize in the Hippocrates competition for poetry and medicine and her work has been published in medical and literary journals. She writes poetry as a form of reflective practice.

Sumit Parikh is the director of Neurogenetics at Cleveland Clinic and graduated from Case Western Reserve University with an Honors in English. He is an avid writer of short poems.

Joanne Philip is a junior doctor working in a private hospital in India. She completed her medical school in Tbilisi, Georgia. She is interested in topics such as physician mental health and global health and equity. She enjoys the beauty and art of medicine and believes that artistic observations can help bring more empathy and understanding to her practice.

Laura Elizabeth Pinto is a writer whose scholarly work was shortlisted for the Ontario Speakers’ Book Award, and she received a Canadian Governor General’s Gold Medal, among other honors. Her creative writing has appeared in Decomp, HAD, Sociological Review Magazine’s Fictions Series and Tint Journal and is forthcoming in The Tonic and Studies in Social Justice.

Alice Ranjan is a graduate of the University of Washington-Seattle, where she received a B.S. in Microbiology, B.S. in Molecular/Cellular/Developmental Biology, and a minor in English. During her time there, she served as a founding member and editor-in-chief of Capillaries Journal (https://www.capillariesjournal.com/), a publication that includes written and art works on health, illness, and healing, as well as academic pieces on public/global health issues. She has also worked as a cancer research fellow at the National Institutes of Health and aspires to combine medicine, clinical research and the arts in her future career.

Joan Roger is an emergency medicine physician who resides in the Pacific Northwest. When not practicing medicine or spending time in nature with her family, Roger is earning her MFA in poetry at Pacific University. Through the writing of poetry she has begun to find a voice for her experience of working at Ground Zero on 9/11/01. During that time, she was a third-year medical resident at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. Roger has published poems in The Healing Muse, Thimble, The Human Touch and Canary magazine.

Dealla Samadi is a first-year resident in Internal Medicine and Pediatrics at the University of Kentucky. Her passion for medicine is driven largely by her love for humanity, believing art, humanity and medicine know no boundary. This passion was nurtured over the years by her involvement at Ashland Terrace Retirement Home, her work as an intern in the "Artistes en Normandie" art exhibit in Deauville, France, and her research on Jean-Paul Sartre's book La Reine Albemarle. Samadi, the daughter of two Lebanese immigrants, believes in the growth and connection found in storytelling and produces the podcast "On Becoming" to share the stories of people at all levels of their medical training.

Steven Scaglione is an artist and Pediatrics resident living and working in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Printmaking is his most utilized medium to tell visual stories, with his recent work focusing on the parts of physician training and practice that make little sense to those outside the field. Scaglione's previous work, “Five Liters (A Tough Problem),” was featured in Intima's Spring 2021 issue. Learn more: artprintsbysteven.bigcartel.com. IG: @stevenscagli_one.

Galen Schram is a writer, student of Narrative Medicine and physical therapist from New York City. His stories have been published in Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, Bellevue Literary Review and Pulse—Voices from the Heart of Medicine.

Maya J. Sorini is a narrative medicine scholar, medical student and award-winning poet. Her first collection, The Boneheap in the Lion's Den, won the 2023 Press 53 Award for Poetry. She has a master's degree and has taught in Columbia University's Narrative Medicine program, and continues to work as a freelance Narrative Medicine workshop facilitator. Her work has appeared in many arts and medical journals, including JAMA, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine and Doxy's Op Med. Sorini attends Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine and lives in Bergen County with her grandmother.

Stefanie Stockhamer is a fourth-year medical student at Ben Gurion University of the Negev Medical School for International Health in Beer Sheva, Israel. Originally from Toronto, Canada, she grew up singing in choirs and musical theater productions. She continues to foster her passion for music through her volunteer work with the music therapy program at Soroka Medical Center. She is a firm believer that music is medicine and has the power to heal beyond a physical sense. She looks forward to continuing to provide holistic care for her parents as a family physician.

Kathryn Taylor is a community doctor who works at a homeless clinic in San Francisco, California.

John Wang is a fourth-year chief resident in the New York University Psychiatry Residency Training Program. Dr. Wang was raised in a family of Chinese immigrants and developed an interest in the health and wellbeing of immigrants early on in his education. After receiving his BA from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, he attended medical school at New York University, where he trained with a diverse patient population, furthering his passion for working with immigrants and their families.

Kenneth R. Weinberg MD has had a 40+ year career as a researcher in psychoneuroimmunology, ER, urgent care and house call MD. Weinberg has been involved with Physicians For a National Health Program, advocating for Single Payer, Universal health coverage, as well as a participant in the Program in Narrative Medicine and a published author, including in The New York Times. For the past eight years he has been a registered cannabis clinician in New York State and advocate to educate legislators, colleagues and the public on the benefits of the plant. He is finishing work on a memoir of stories and reflections on the interface between literature and medicine.

Richard B. Weinberg MD is professor of Internal Medicine-Gastroenterology at Wake Forest University School of Medicine and Professor of Physiology & Pharmacology in the Wake Forest University Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. A graduate of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the University of Chicago Internal Medicine and Gastroenterology training programs, Weinberg has been an academic physician for over four decades. During this time, he has written extensively about his experiences at the bedside and the transformational impact of the doctor-patient relationship.

Patricia Wentzel has several decades under her belt as an expert caregiver and expert patient. She has raised children with severe Osteogenesis Imperfecta, Crohn's, Traumatic Brain Injury, Attention Deficit Disorder, Cholesteatoma and hearing loss, Asthma, one now adult child with bipolar disorder and anxiety compounded by substance use disorder, and two other now adult children who live with depression and anxiety as well as learning disabilities. Her own health has been impacted by breast cancer at 32, post-mastectomy lymphedema, bipolar disorder, arthritis requiring total knee replacement of both knees and severe restless legs syndrome. She writes poetry and the occasional prose piece. Her work has been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Right Hand Pointing and other journals.

Abby Wheeler lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. She is a 2022 Pushcart nominee and has work published or forthcoming in The Cimarron Review; Grist; the anthology, I Thought I Heard A Cardinal Sing: Ohio's Appalachian Voices (Sheila-Na-Gig) and elsewhere. Her chapbook, In the Roots, is available from Finishing Line Press. POETRY: At the doctor’s office, I check, Yes, I have experienced the following: Sudden weight loss

Joseph Zarconi is tenured professor of Internal Medicine and clinical director for Health Humanities Education at the Northeast Ohio Medical University (NEOMED) College of Medicine in Rootstown, Ohio. He is a retired nephrologist and has remained active in the teaching of medical students and residents. He has presented at state, national and international meetings and co-authored peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters on topics relating to medical education, narrative medical practice, narrative ethics, humanism and professionalism, cultural consciousness, close reading and social justice. Zarconi is co-author of two books on narrative in healthcare and a member of the NEOMED Master Teacher Guild; he has been recognized as a Master Teacher by the American College of Physicians.

Bree Zhang (she/hers) is a second-year dental student at Columbia College of Dental Medicine and serves as President for the Class of 2026 and the American Public Health Association (APHA) Oral Health Section Student Liaison. Zhang graduated from Brown University and has given a TedXBrownU talk on tackling the interdisciplinary nature of dentistry through art, music and psychology. As an artist, Zhang's medical-inspired artwork has been featured in Columbia Global Consortium of Climate Health Student Perspectives and Brown Journal of Medical Humanities. As a musician, Zhang has formerly performed five times in Carnegie Hall and two times in the Metropolitan Museum, and she is exploring ways to implement music therapy into medical and dental settings to decrease patient fear and anxiety.

Kristin Camitta Zimet is the author of Take in My Arms the Dark and the editor of The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review. Her poetry is in journals in eight countries. She has been a full-time caregiver, two-time cancer survivor, EMT, hospice patient care volunteer and hospital volunteer in the NICU. She is co-authoring a book about aging and dying.