Sapana Adhikari, MD is a practicing Emergency Medicine physician in Charlotte, NC. Her artistic goal is to document the human experience from her unique perspective, as a physician. Dr. Adhikari wants her viewers to get a glimpse into her world, her thoughts and her opinions, relating to health, disease and the human body. She hopes to share the beauty of the emotional highs and devastating lows that make up the human experience and share her small contribution to it. Her artwork has been shown in The National Academy of Medicine permanent online gallery, the Frederic Jameson Gallery at Duke University, in a previous Intima issue and several private collections. She has also donated her art to the charity Musa Masala, to raise money for the Wongchu Sherpa Memorial hospital near Everest base camp.

Ariel Bugosh Boswell is a nurse and writer who lives in Rochester, Minnesota. She strongly believes poetry can help to heal the body, mind and soul. Boswell has worked as a nurse at Mayo Clinic since 2012 as an inpatient float nurse and in outpatient primary care. She has facilitated Literature and Medicine sessions at Mayo Clinic to encourage reflection and writing since 2017. She is a registered nurse with a BA in Anthropology from Davidson College and BSN from Minnesota State University. She spends her free time with her husband Chris Boswell, their two young children and their dog.

Brina Bui is graduating from McGovern Medical School this May, and she will start her pediatric residency at UT Southwestern in June. Her piece explores two simple articles of clothing: a white coat and a patient gown. The juxtaposition of the fabrics emphasizes the stark contrast between doctors and patients, but the intertwined nature of the clothes explores the blurred line between the two groups. These garments both create and illustrate a power differential that can shatter when doctors become patients themselves

Simona Carini writes nonfiction and poetry and has been published in various venues, in print and online. Born in Perugia, Italy, a graduate of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart (Milan, Italy) and of Mills College (Oakland, CA), Carini lives in Northern California with her husband and works as an academic researcher in Medical Information Science. See more of her work at simonacarini.com

Nancy Chong is the Development Associate at Visual AIDS, the only arts organization fully committed to raising AIDS awareness and creating dialogue around HIV issues today, by preserving and honoring the work of artists with HIV/AIDS and artistic contributions of the AIDS movement. She is also a New York State Department of Health-certified emergency department advocate of the Mount Sinai Hospital's Sexual Assault and Violence Intervention Program.

Michal Coret is a medical student at the University of Toronto. She writes poetry, short fiction and plays about medical encounters and experiences in medical school. Her creative work and research has appeared in Survive and Thrive: A Journal for Medical Humanities and Narrative as Medicine and The Muse magazine. She is passionate about qualitative research in medical humanities, empathy and education. She is the co-director of ArtBeat at the University of Toronto, which strives to bring the humanities to medical students in a meaningful and engaging way.

Spoorthi Davala is a fourth-year medical student at Boston University School of Medicine and received her BA in Medical Science and Minor in Visual Arts from Boston University. She was the 2016-17 Artist-in-Residence for Boston Medical Center where she organized individual and group art lessons to help improve the motor functions of patients with neurodegenerative disease. As a medical student, she served as co-president for the service club Art S.P.A.C.E. (Supporting People And Creating Empowerment) and has written articles highlighting the importance of creativity for the website Doctors Who Create. Spoorthi continues to explore the intersection of art and medicine through different mediums including painting, drawing and animation. Find more of her work at spoorthidavala.myportfolio.com

Anna Delamerced is a medical student at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. She received funding through the Bray Medical Humanities Fellowship to pursue a year-long project, focusing on poetry for kids in the hospital. Her works have been published in KevinMD, Medscape, Abaton, Plexus, Murmur, Cornerstone and in-Training. She is passionate about listening to people tell their stories.

Julia Festa is a fourth-year medical student at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. Festa, who graduated from Princeton University in 2014 with a degree in Sociology and Gender Studies, will be applying to Pediatric residencies in the fall.

Rachel Fleishman is a neonatologist practicing in Philadelphia who studied creative writing as an undergraduate student. She writes about her experiences caring for infants, often exploring the intersection of her own provider grief and the grief of parents whose infants require extraordinary care. She is honored to have her essays appear in publications such as The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Journal of the American Medical Association, Literary Mama and Hektoen International’s Journal of Medical Humanities. She is a wife and the mother of two boys who haven’t decided yet what they think about her descriptions of their antics

Diane Forman is a writer and educator. After a long career as writing tutor and educational consultant, Forman is working on a series of essays and a memoir. Additionally, she leads adult writing groups and retreats on the north shore of Boston. Forman, who holds a BS in English and Education from Northwestern University, and an Ed.M. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is an AWA affiliate, trained and certified to lead workshops in the AWA (Amherst Artists and Writers) method.

Nina Gaby is a writer, visual artist and advanced practice nurse who specializes in addiction and psychiatry. Gaby has worked with words, clay and people for five decades. Her essays, fiction, prose poetry and articles have been published widely, most recently in Psychiatric Times, The Rumpus, McSweeney's, and The Brevity Blog. She was chosen as runner-up in Quarter-After-Eight's Robert DeMott Short Prose Contest and in The Diagram. Her artwork is held in the Smithsonian, Arizona State University and Rochester Institute of Technology. Her anthology “Dumped: Stories of Women Unfriending Women” was published in 2015. She exhibits her mixed media widely in the Northeast and maintains a clinical practice in psychiatry. In addition to a Master's degree in Psych-Mental Health nursing, Gaby holds a bachelor's degree in Fine Arts, offers trainings, workshops, and has taught at several universities. Find out more about her work at ninagaby.com.

Florence Gelo is faculty at Drexel University, College of Medicine in Philadelphia. She has over twenty-five years’ experience working with patients receiving palliative care as a former hospital and hospice chaplain. She uses the visual arts as a teaching tool to enhance clinical skills. She has published numerous articles in professional journals about illness, death and dying. Her most recent project used images of narrative paintings to assist hospice patients to speak about the day-to-day realities of living while dying. Work on “Cigarettes, Coffee, Cookies and a Good Rest” was funded by the Foundation for Spirituality and Medicine in Baldwin, MD.

Karen Lea Germain is a Los Angeles native who recently relocated to Colorado with her British husband and two spoiled cats. She graduated from the UCLA Extension Writer’s Program and is working on her first novel. While at UCLA, her novel was nominated for The James Kirkwood Literary Prize, an award for outstanding works-in-progress. Germain spent over a decade in the theme park industry and several years working in behavioral research at a local zoo. Among other projects, she has spent over 2000 hours observing flamingos. Flamingos are no longer her favorite birds. Find more of her work at alwayspackedforadventure.com

Ohirenua Giwa-amu is a Nigerian born artist looking to normalize blackness and survive the COVID-19 outbreak. Giwa-Amu is a 2D artist with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Animation and Interactive technology from the Savannah College Of Art And Design (SCAD). Her graduating thesis film "The Stick" is featured in the sixth season of PBS & KQED television series “Film School Shorts.” 

Dustin Grinnell is a writer based in Boston. His fiction and creative nonfiction combines medicine and the humanities and has appeared in Perspectives in Biology & Medicine, Hektoen International and Ars Medica. Grinnell, who is the author of the sci-fi novels, The Genius Dilemma and Without Limits, holds an MFA in creative writing from Pine Manor College, an MS in physiology from Penn State, and a BA in psychobiology from Wheaton College (MA). He works as a staff writer for Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Rebecca Grossman-Kahn MD is a resident physician in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her interest in medical humanities has led her to The Examined Life conference in Iowa City, to a workshop in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University, and to tell a live story at the annual Twin Cities resident story slam. Her professional interests include medical education, clinical ethics and humanism in medicine. When not at the hospital, she can be found listening to samba music and touring historic houses. Her Field Notes essay “Confined” was written during the initial weeks of the coronavirus pandemic.

Sarah J. Harvin is a student at Columbia University, earning a Master of Science in Narrative Medicine. She owes her renewed interest in writing and poetry to the program and to the encouragement of faculty members and classmates. Prior to Narrative Medicine, Harvin studied psychology and critical race theory; her focus was on the intersection of race, gender, and access to healthcare. Her professional experience thus far has ranged from working in higher education (residential life and housing) to working in a hospital as a patient care assistant. Harvin is applying to medical school this spring and her hobbies include exploring NYC coffee shops, sailing and re-reading the Harry Potter series.

Lisa Jacobs, MD, MBA is a child, adolescent and adult psychiatrist in Menlo Park, CA. She is the Assistant Director of The Pegasus Physician Writers at Stanford and the Editor at Large of the Pegasus Review.

Laila Knio is a fourth-year medical student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She recently completed her third year of medical school at a satellite campus in the mountains of North Carolina, where she participated in a Longitudinal Integrated Clerkship Program and began learning how to play her dream instrument—the cello. She holds an infinite curiosity towards people—anyone, really—and believes stories are a powerful mode of healing. She anticipates pursuing a career as an adolescent psychiatrist.

Katrina Kostro, MD, graduated from Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians & Surgeons in Spring 2020, and was selected into the Gold Humanism Honor Society. She will begin psychiatry residency training at NYU/Bellevue. She received her BA in art history from Barnard College. Before medical school, she became a certified yoga instructor and has taught multiple yoga/meditation workshops for students, physicians, patients, and caregivers. Her poems have appeared in BigCityLit, Mezzo Cammin, Reflexions: The Literary & Fine Arts Journal of CUIMC, and she was an award-winner in NEOMED’s 35th William Carlos Williams Poetry Competition. Katrina strives to combine yoga, meditation, poetry and art into her practice of clinical healing.

Adam Lalley is a graduate of the Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell and an incoming Emergency Medicine resident at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn. He is a winner of the Michael E. DeBakey Medical Student Poetry Award, hosted by Baylor College of Medicine, and the William Carlos Williams Poetry Competition hosted by Northeast Ohio Medical University. His short fiction, poetry and non-fiction have been featured in Narrateur: Reflections on Caring, the Journal of Medical Humanities and The Eagle and the Wren Reading Series. He was a finalist in the 2020 NYACP Story Slam and is working on a book-length work of non-fiction about how patients find meaning in illness. Learn more about his work at adamlalley.com

Elizabeth Lanphier is a social and political philosopher and medical ethicist. She received her PhD from Vanderbilt University, an MS degree in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University, and was an Ethics Fellow at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. She joins the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Ethics Center faculty in 2020.

Katharine Lawrence is an internal medicine physician living and working in New York City. Her writing and poetry has been featured in the Annals of Internal Medicine, Academic Medicine AM Rounds, in-House and KevinMD.

Samuel LeBaron was born in Canada and completed his medical school training there. He earned a PhD in clinical psychology from Michigan State University. Now living in California, he is a Stanford Professor Emeritus with a long career as a family physician and clinical psychologist. His career has included research on management of pain in children and adolescents in cancer; primary care for children and adults; adult and pediatric hospice; and active engagement in medical education. Although he has published extensively in academic journals regarding pain and dying among children as well as adults, he has only recently turned to creative writing. He recently completed a memoir, “Ordinary Deaths.” In his experience, our stories make us more mindful and appreciative of ourselves and others.

Delilah Leibowitz is pursuing a Master of Science in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University. She holds a B.A. in Health and the Human Sciences from the University of Southern California. In addition to her professional interests in the intersection of the sciences and humanities, she enjoys writing, poetry, and literature.

Grace Li is a graduate of Duke University, where she studied biology and creative writing, and is currently in medical school at Stanford. Her short fiction has been recognized by The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest and Stanford's Paul Kalanithi Writing Award, and has been published in Hyphen magazine. To learn more about her work, visit gracedli.com.

Katie McNiel is a third-year medical student at Dell Medical School in her hometown of Austin, Texas. Since childhood, she has used creative writing as an outlet for processing the world around her. From writing songs for her guitar to editing her college literary magazine, McNiel has allowed this work to guide her. McNiel plans to pursue residency training in Internal Medicine/Pediatrics with the goal of providing equity-focused primary care across the lifespan. When she is not writing or studying, she enjoys cuddling with her dogs and watching “Gilmore Girls” on repeat.

Justin Millan is a writer and registered nurse working in long-term acute care in New England.

Jeffrey Millstein, MD is a general internist and writer. Dr. Millstein serves as associate medical director for Patient Experience at Regional Practices of Penn Medicine, where he leads initiatives for clinicians and staff to help improve patient centered communication skills. He is a clinical preceptor for students at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and is working on developing new humanities curricula for medical students. You can find him @millstej on Twitter.

Larry Oakner has published two books of poems, SEX LOVE RELIGION (Blind Tattoo Press, 2018) and The 614th Commandment, the latter under his pseudonym, Eleazar Baruch (Blind Tattoo Press, 2019), along with a chapbook, Sitting Still. His poems will be forthcoming in The Oddville Press and WINK. Oakner’s poems have appeared in Tricycle: Buddhist News, Lost Coast Review,The Jewish Literary Review, Kerem, Home Planet News and The Long Island Quarterly, among others. He received his M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of California at Los Angeles. Oakner is co-editor of The Poem Shop, an open online poetry website.

Samuel Payne is a second-year medical student at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. He received a BS in chemical and biological engineering from the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he found community and support in an engineering humanities program. He looks to create similar spaces within the world of health care and foster narrative thinking in his communities to follow.

Scott Pearson is a cancer surgeon and medical educator. A Professor of Surgery at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, he teaches anatomy and the importance of the patient’s narrative in giving care. Pearson is a former Fellow at The Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities and is the author of the novels, Rupture and Public Anatomy.

Elisabeth Preston-Hsu is a Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation physician in clinical practice in Atlanta, Georgia. She has had work appear in Glassworks magazine, Hektoen International and received an Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train's Short Story Awards for New Writers in March/April 2019. Her photograph "Gordian Knot" happened organically: a busy clinic day and a stethoscope thrown onto her desk. A glance at its twisted knot of tubing reminded her how difficult it can be for patients, caregivers, and healthcare workers alike to navigate, be cared for and work in the American healthcare system.

Pablo Romano is a third-year medical student at Stanford University School of Medicine interested in psychiatry and neuroscience. He grew up between the suburbs of Los Angeles and Guadalajara, Mexico and studied Cognitive Science at Occidental College. He was the 2019 honorable mention of the Irvin David Yalom, MD Literary Award for an essay exploring themes of death and education. At Stanford, Pablo created a recurring storytelling series called Talk Rx, where students at the medical school are given speaker coaching and a platform to tell their stories, live and in front of an audience of peers. In his free time, he’s likely engaged in conversation with anyone who will listen or catering to Sunny, his recently-adopted ten-year-old five-pound chihuahua.

Hui-wen Sato practices as a pediatric ICU nurse in Los Angeles. She blogs regularly for the American Journal of Nursing (AJN) in Off the Charts. Her writing has been published in the Oxford Handbook of Meaningful Work as well as the Reflections column for AJN. In September 2017, she delivered a TEDxTalk titled "How Grief Can Enable Nurses to Endure," and she has been featured as a keynote speaker at numerous national nursing conferences. She is pursuing her Certification in Narrative Medicine through Columbia University. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, two children and two ornery tortoises. Learn more about her work at http://heartofnursing.blog.

Sarah Schlegel is a pediatric resident at Boston Medical Center and Boston Children’s Hospital. She has been passionate about literature and creative writing since childhood and first became involved with narrative medicine as a medical student at Stanford Medical School. She is thankful for the chance she had to participate in workshops, creative writing classes, and writing retreats at Stanford and looks forward to continuing to write as a physician. She has published in university literary journals at Stanford Medical School and Harvard University and in the Boston Globe. She is deeply grateful for the years she had with her compassionate and courageous grandparents, who inspired her poem.

Ariel Scott is a family medicine physician at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine where she practices as a hospitalist, primary care physician and specialty care physician for adults with intellectual and developmental disability. She was involved in the Columbia Narrative Medicine Online Certificate Program and co-teaches a Writing & Healing elective for fourth-year medical students as well as a reflective writing course for pre-med students. She looks forward to furthering her own study of narrative medicine in the near future.​

Andrew Taylor-Troutman is the author of four books, most recently Gently Between the Words: Essays and Poems. Taylor-Troutman, who earned a graduate certificate in Narrative Healthcare from Lenoir-Rhyne University, serves as pastor of Chapel in the Pines Presbyterian Church in North Carolina. He and his wife, also an ordained minister, parent three children.

Jordan Teitelbaum, D.O. is an Otolaryngologist / Head & Neck Surgeon with subspecialty training in Rhinology and Endoscopic Skull Base Surgery. He was born and raised in Chicago and majored in English at the University of Michigan prior to completing medical school in Harlem, NYC, ENT residency at Ohio University, and fellowship at Duke University. He is grateful for the opportunity to express his medical and surgical experiences through writing. He also truly appreciates the opportunity to interact with others’ work and thus maintain a persistent connection to his roots.

Wesley Usher is a writer and visual artist with a license in professional counseling. Her related past projects include New York art exhibitions of solo and group works by artists living with disability and a series of murals for the acute care areas of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. She has also designed and developed collective narrative group work for the inpatient psychiatric setting. Since 2006 Usher has explored the implications of technology on feminine self-narrative and wellness, including four multi-media projects that explore relationships between technology, language, power and voice. (The Cassandra Code, The Cambridge Key, The story of e and Riddlespeak.) She holds graduate degrees in Applied Psychology and Narrative Medicine from New York University and Columbia University and is pursuing post-graduate studies in Drawing and Painting at the Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design. Most recently her artwork has been published in The Round (Brown University), The After Happy Hour Review (Pittsburgh) and Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.

Arany Uthayakumar is a first-year medical student at the Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell in Long Island, NY. She is gradually finding her feet as a New Yorker and identifies very loudly as a Californian native in the meantime. Her identity has been intricately shaped by the Bay Area's fine educational communities: UC Berkeley for her undergraduate education, and the Pegasus Physician Writers of Stanford School of Medicine for her journey and discovery of self as an aspiring physician-writer. She has been working on a novel about the resilience of displaced Tamil civilians in the aftermath of Sri Lanka's genocide, and daydreams about writing when she should be poring over anatomy and histology textbooks.

Eileen Valinoti, BSN, M.A. has had a varied career in oncology, nursing education and nursing, Valinoti is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Confrontation, Parents, Glamour and The New York Times.

Rhiannon Weber wrote her first poem when she was nine years old. She went on to earn her BA in print journalism and has held writing roles on all ends of the spectrum, from editing to closed captioning. Her poetry has appeared in Obsessed with Pipework, Blue Collar Review, The Storyteller, Iodine Poetry Journal, POEM, and The Orchard Street Press. She hopes that one day her acceptance letter pile will reach higher heights than her rejection letter pile.

Sophia Wilson lives with her primary care physician husband and their three children in Otago, New Zealand. She has a background in arts, medicine and psychiatry. Her recent poetry/prose can be found in StylusLit, Not Very Quiet, Ars Medica, Hektoen International, Poems in the Waiting Room (NZ), Corpus and elsewhere. In 2019 the manuscript for her first children’s novel, ‘The Guardian of Whale Mountain’ was selected in the top ten for the Green Stories Competition (UK). She was shortlisted in a number of poetry competitions including the Takahē Monica Taylor Prize, was a finalist in the 2019 Robert Burns Poetry Competition and was winner of the 2020 International Writers Workshop Flash Fiction Competition. She is the recipient of a 2020 Creative New Zealand grant.

James Wyshynski is a former editor of the Black Warrior Review. His poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Terminus, River Styx, Stoneboat, Interim, Nimrod, The Cortland Review, Barrow Street, The Cincinnati Review, Vallum and are forthcoming in the Northern New England Review and others. His chapbook, Visiting Hours, from which his poem is taken, is in search of publisher.

Yan Emily Yuan, MD, MSc is a 2014 graduate of the Master of Science program in Narrative Medicine. She is an internal medicine resident physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital and will be starting her endocrinology fellowship at the same institution in July 2020. She practices meditative painting and finds inspiration in her patients’ narratives, her day-to-day life as a medical resident, and the natural environment.