Nicholas Aldredge is a graduating fourth-year medical student at the University of Virginia and will be a resident physician in emergency medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle in 2021. He writes short stories and poems exploring the nature of illness and the patient-physician relationship and hopes his pieces encourage readers to engage in further dialogue about the complex themes of narrative medicine.

Larry Atlas is the author of plays, among them “Total Abandon,” “Permanent” and “Yield of the Long Bond,” and worked on more than twenty screenplay projects in Hollywood including “Sleepless in Seattle.” He is co-inventor of the first navigable non-linear video technology, and wrote and directed a pilot example, “The Onyx Project.” In midlife, serendipitously, he took some courses in, and fell in love with, nursing. He became an RN, and worked as an acute care nurse while attending graduate school, after which he worked for ten years as a hospitalist nurse practitioner at Vassar Brothers Medical Center, and at Sharon Hospital in Connecticut. “South Eight” is an excerpt from his new novel of hospital life.

Manisha Bharadia is a third-year medical student at the University of Alberta. She is also the founder and senior curator of OBLIQUITY – a Canadian humanities and medicine workshop series that seeks to highlight the essential interconnectedness of the arts and sciences (www.obliquity13.com). Bharadia's most recent publications Cinnamon (CMAJ Humanities) and Endurance (Murmurs) explore the intersections of familial roles, autonomy, and duty.

Kshama Bhyravabhotla is an internal medicine/pediatrics resident at Tulane University in New Orleans. Her passions include underserved patient care, teaching medical students and telling the humbling stories of the incredible community she is privileged enough to serve and how it has changed her.

Simone Blaser is a second-year resident in Internal Medicine at New York University. Prior to medical school, she worked in publishing on medicine and health-related books, including developing When Breath Becomes Air with the late Dr. Paul Kalanithi. Her poetry was included in a collection on New York City haiku published by The New York Times; her narrative prose has been published by the NYU Langone journal Clinical Correlations. She hopes to pursue a fellowship in Infectious Disease after residency.

Ewan Bowlby  is a doctoral student at the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts (ITIA) in St Andrews. He is researching ways of using mass-media artworks to design new arts-based interventions providing emotional, psychological and spiritual care for cancer patients. This involves using fictional narratives, characters, and imagery to reflect and reframe patients' experiences of living with cancer, helping them to understand and articulate the effect of cancer on their lives. He is developing the impact of his research through an ongoing collaboration with Maggie Jencks Cancer Care Trust (Maggie's) and Northumberland Cancer Support Group (NCSG). Other interests include theological engagement with popular culture, the relationship between theology and humor and the use of narrative form for theological expression. 

Simona Carini , who was born in Perugia, Italy, writes poetry and nonfiction and has been published in various venues, in print and online, including Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, Sheila-Na-Gig online, Star 82 Review, the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, the American Journal of Nursing. She is a graduate of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart (Milan, Italy) and of Mills College (Oakland, CA) and lives in Northern California with her husband and works as a data scientist at an academic research institution. Her website is https://simonacarini.com

Albert Howard Carter, III, PhD, is a faculty affiliate, Trent Center, Duke University. His latest book is In Peril: All People, All Life, Our Earth; In Prospect: Better Healthcare and Medicine (UCMedicalHumanitiesPress.com, 2019). Of five earlier books, one is First Cut, A Season in the Human Anatomy Lab (Picador, 1997). His prose and poems have appeared in New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Hiram Review, Ars Medica, Blood and Thunder, Broadkill Review, Statement, The Thomas Wolfe Review, and The Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine. He has been a pastoral care volunteer in an ER/Trauma Center also a licensed massage therapist and certified Qigong healer working with cancer patients. Carter taught literature at Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, Fla., for many years. He and his wife live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Eileen Vorbach Collins is an RN from Baltimore. She earned her BSN from the University of Maryland and a master's degree in pastoral care from Loyola University. Her writing has been published in the Santa Fe Writer's Project, Reed magazine, The Columbia Journal and elsewhere. Her essays have received the Diana Woods Memorial Award for Creative Nonfiction, The Gabriele Rico Challenge Award, and two Pushcart Prize nominations. She is working on a collection of essays about bereavement. Read more about her work here

Margaux Danby holds an MS in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University and a BA from Vanderbilt University. In Fall 2021, she will begin her medical education at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine.

Molly Dickler is an artist and photographer whose interests span visual art, performance and fashion. Dickler attended California College of the Arts, where she studied fashion, then switched to photography, which she has continued studying at Otis College of Art and Design, in Los Angeles.  She will graduate in May 2021, with a BFA in photography and a minor in teaching. Overdose (2020) is one of a series called The Loss of a Loved One about real or imagined traumas, in which Dickler is both the model and the photographer.

Photo by Emiliano Contreras

Alexandre Djandji is a researcher in the field of Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility and is a graduate student in the Narrative Medicine program at Columbia University. As a Middle Eastern-American raised in Houston and Dubai, Djandji is interested in using art as a medium to process the conflicting and harmonious elements of the delivery of care.

William J. 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. In addition to articles in scholarly journals, Doan has co-authored three books and several plays. He has created solo performance projects at a variety of venues across the U.S., and abroad. His current work includes a new performance piece, Frozen In The Toilet Paper Aisle of Life, part of a larger project titled The Anxiety Project. Work from this project includes multiple short graphic narratives published in the Annals of Internal Medicine/Graphic Medicine. He is a Professor of Theatre in the College of Arts and Architecture and Director of the Arts and Design Research Incubator at The Pennsylvania State University. Doan served as the Penn State Laureate for 2019-2020.

Kelly Elterman is an anesthesiologist and writer in San Antonio, Texas, who has loved both writing and medicine from a young age. In medical school, she published prose and award-winning poetry in The Legible Script, a national literary journal for medical students and later focused primarily on scientific writing. More recently, Elterman has returned to poetry and prose and her work has appeared in KevinMD.com and the San Antonio Medicine magazine. Learn more on kellyeltermanmd.com.

Orly Nadell Farber is a graduating medical student at Stanford University School of Medicine and an incoming surgical resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Orly’s writing has previously appeared in Intima, STAT News, Scope, and the Boston Globe. She hopes to carve out time to continue writing throughout the next phase of her training.

Audrey Ferber is a San Francisco writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, LILITH Magazine, New World Writing, The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Cimarron Review, Persimmon Tree and elsewhere. She teaches at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute and the Writers Grotto, where  she is a proud member. Ferber has been the primary care-taker for her husband for many years and is at work on a collection of stories and essays chronicling her experience.

Lauren Fields is a graduating fourth-year medical student at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, going into psychiatry. Poetry has been an important part of her journey to, and through, medical school. Her poems have been published in Blackberry: a magazine, Linden Avenue Literary Journal, WATER Literary and Arts Magazine, Reflexions Literary and Fine Arts Journal of CUIMC, and Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, and she tied for second prize in the 2020 International FPM-Hippocrates Health Professional Poetry Award.

Stephanie Francalancia is an illustrator and aspiring physician who uses creative practice to connect better with those around her. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan with majors in Art & Design and Biology. She is inspired by her grandmother, who was diagnosed with dementia but still reveals her personality and expression through painting and knitting. Francalancia created these illustrations while working closely with an inpatient, Mr. A, at a memory loss center. Her portraits aim to display Mr. A's identity while he simultaneously produced his own pieces, which are the black and white paintings. Hoping to continue illuminating patients’ narratives through art, Francalancia will be a graduate student at Columbia University’s Narrative Medicine Program in the fall.

Julie Freedman is a hospitalist and palliative care physician at a community hospital in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her medical degree from Harvard University and trained in internal medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. She believes that we need narrative almost as we need shelter: we build stories around ourselves in the face of serious illness. Understanding, and sometimes entering, these stories is an essential part of caring for patients. On the other hand, after this last year, she is thinking it might also be lovely to become a florist. She is on Twitter @jfreedmanmd.

Selene Frost is a writer as well as a chief resident in general surgery. She's spent the last year developing and implementing a Narrative Medicine curriculum for her surgical residency program involving weekly prompts for clinical reflection and quarterly didactic and discussion sessions. Her interests include the intersections between art and medicine and the examination and rewriting of surgical culture. She believes that the future of medicine lies in the revision of the narratives that hold us back and the telling of stories that move us forward. She hopes to dedicate her career to the training of empathetic and humanistic surgeons. Her creative work has been published in Oddball Magazine. She can be found on Instagram @selenefrostpoetry

Teddy G. Goetz (he/him or they/them) is a psychiatry resident at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to earning his MD at Columbia University, College of Physicians and Surgeons, he studied biochemistry and gender studies at Yale, conducting research on a wide spectrum of biologically- and socially-determined aspects of gender-based health disparities, including earning his MS developing the first animal model of gender-affirming hormone therapy. His current focuses include mixed-methods research on LGBTQ mental health, as well as narrative medicine and physician advocacy. More about his scholarly and artistic work can be found at teddygoetz.com.

Ellen Goldsmith is a poet and teacher, author of Where to Look, Such Distances and No Pine Tree in This Forest Is Perfect which won the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center 1997 chapbook contest and was described by Dennis Nurkse, the contest judge, as an “incandescent collection.” Her poems have appeared in Antiphon, Connecticut River Review, Dash, Earth's Daughters, The Healing Muse, Mount Hope, Off the Coast, Third Wednesday and The Whirlwind Review. She holds an Ed.D. from Teachers College, Columbia University and is professor emeritus of The City University of New York. She lives in Cushing, Maine.

Gregory Price Grieve is Professor and Head of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Grieve graduated from the University of Chicago’s Divinity school, and studies at the intersection of Asian religions and popular culture. He specializes in digital religion, particularly the emerging field of religion and video games, and his current research uses video games to explore the category of evil in contemporary life. Along with his academic career Grieve graduated with a degree in film from San Francisco State University, and paints, makes films, and tinkers with conceptual art.  He has shown work both nationally and internationally, and in September 2020, had a retrospective of his artworks as part of Flick - Experimental Film Festival 2020.

Britta Gustavson is currently a third-year medical student at McGill University. She previously studied Neuroscience at McGill University and completed a Masters in Brain Sciences at University College London. Gustavson  enjoys investigating the links between clinical practice, patient narratives, and literature. She would like to thank Professor Miranda Hickman for her guidance and expertise throughout the writing of her paper.

Gloria Heffernan is the author of the poetry collection, What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List (New York Quarterly Books), and the e-book, Exploring Poetry of Presence:  A Companion Guide (Back Porch Productions).  She has written two chapbooks:  Hail to the Symptom (Moonstone Press) and Some of Our Parts (Finishing Line Press). Her work has appeared in over seventy journals including Chautauqua, Columbia Review, Magma (UK), Stone Canoe, The Healing Muse and Yale University Medicine School's literary journal, The Perch. She teaches at Le Moyne College and the Syracuse YMCA’s Downtown Writers Center.

Beda Higgins works in General Practice in North England as a psychiatric and general nurse. She has two collections of prizewinning short stories published and her first collection of poetry OURSELVES was joint winner of the Geoff Stevens award 2020 and is currently short-listed for the Pigott Poetry Prize 2021. Higgins has run creative writing workshops and literary projects over the years: The most far reaching and successful project was following funding received from the Queen’s Nursing Institute Award to pilot a project to use creative writing as a therapeutic tool with patients who have life-limiting illnesses. This project led to the establishment of creative writing sessions for patients at St. Oswald’s Hospice and remains a successful and well-used service to date.

Sonya Huber is the author of six books, including the award-winning essay collection on chronic pain, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System and the forthcoming Supremely Tiny Acts: A Memoir in a Day. Her other books include Opa Nobody, Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir, and The Backwards Research Guide for Writers. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, and other outlets. She teaches at Fairfield University and in the Fairfield low-residency MFA program.

H. Reade Joo, PhD, is an MD/PhD candidate in the final year of medical school at UCSF in California, who studies the neurophysiology of memory and relies on stories and storytelling as a method of healing.

Beatrice Khater  is a family physician living in Beirut (Lebanon). She combines her clinical and academic work with her passion for literature through writing and reading. Khater has participated in collective works published in Lebanon and also  published  La fille des miracles, a collection of short stories.

Jordana Kritzer, MD  is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis where she received her BA in Anthropology and Theater.  During medical school at SUNY Downstate, Dr. Kritzer created many storytelling opportunities including Stories Forum Initiative, “The Vagina Monologues” and the annual “Stories from the Wards.” She completed her Emergency Medicine residency training at Jacobi Medical Center/Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. She is a board certified Assistant Professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine where she teaches classes on clinical empathy and communication within the doctor-patient relationship.  Dr. Kritzer works at Montefiore’s Wakefield campus as an attending physician, caring for patients and teaching residents. She was named Emergency Medicine Physician of the Year in 2015.

Alyson Lee  is a current MS candidate in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University. Her interests lie at the intersection of illness narratives, global health and cultural humility. Lee  grew up for several years in East Africa and is based in New York.

Albert Leung is a physician-scientist who has drifted away from patient care over the last two decades, drawn more by the science than the art of medicine.  Having experienced the illness and death of several loved ones in recent years, he sometimes wonders whether his career would have taken a different path if he had these experiences earlier in his life.  This is his first attempt at writing poetry and first non-scientific writing published.

Jennifer Li is a fourth-year medical student at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia. In 2016, she graduated from Emory with a Bachelor of Arts in English concentrated in multi-ethnic contemporary American literature and a minor in Music. She has always held a strong belief in the power of the arts and poetry to exemplify interpersonal connection and the human condition. Li is also passionate about addressing healthcare disparities, highlighting intersectionality and patient-centered care, and mentorship and education. After graduation in May, she will be pursuing a career in Internal Medicine.

Renata Khoshroo Louwers is the editor and co-founder of Months To Years, a literary journal that explores grief and loss through nonfiction, poetry, and art. Her essays have appeared in STAT News and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Her work has also been anthologized in My Shadow is My Skin: Voices from the Iranian Diaspora (University of Texas Press, 2020).

Zainab Mabizari is a writer, poet and physician of Algerian descent. She received an MS in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University and is completing a social-justice focused internal medicine residency in New York City. She has been serving as a Doximity Op-Med Fellow and will be serving as the 2021 AMWA Artist-in-Residence. Pandemic permitting, you can find her reading in a coffee shop or performing poetry at a local open mic.

Greg Mahr is an academic psychiatrist in Detroit. He has published poetry and flash fiction in a number of journals, including Intima, CHEST, Flash Fiction, Third Wednesday and Peninsula Poets. His non-fiction book “The Wisdom and Science of Dreams” will be published by Routledge Press early in 2022.

Sujal Manohar lives and thrives at the intersection of the arts and sciences. A Duke University graduate with degrees in neuroscience and visual arts, she does not view these fields as mutually exclusive. Art is a tool to connect with others and help them heal, as well as an avenue for health-related advocacy and awareness. Manohar  has designed collaborative murals in healthcare settings, taught art to pediatric patients, and led art gallery tours for adults with dementia. Her work has been displayed at the Texas State Fair, Duke Wellness Center, and Kenan Keohane Gallery. Currently, Manohar  serves as a Hart Fellow and AmeriCorps Artist in Residence at Imagine Art, anart studio for people with disabilities. She plans to start medical school in 2021.

Jackie Mantey is a writer and visual artist. She lives in Chicago. Find out more here and on Instagram @jackiemantey.

Sal Marx is a multimedia artist, chronic disease patient, and cat mom. Through visual storytelling, they work to empower patients and promote health justice in the biomedical sphere. Sal lives with Ankylosing Spondylitis and other inflammatory conditions. They are in the Narrative Medicine M.S. Program at Columbia University.

Kat McNichol is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Dreamers Creative Writing. She holds a B.A. in English Literature, and an MAIS in Writing and New Media, and Literary Studies. She is completing a PhD in Career Writing at the University of Tilburg where she is using autoethnography and writing as method to research the impact that therapeutic writing has on career identity. McNichol has spent the past decade writing marketing copy for the high-tech industry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous trade publications, journals and anthologies including Riverfeet Press, the Journal of Arts and Humanities, Arts Research International, Cold Mountain Review, Echo and Every Day Fiction.

Alex Miner is a second year medical student at Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine in Roanoke, Virginia. She is passionate about all things art and science and spends her free time reading, figure skating, and adventuring. Prior to medical school she completed her masters thesis on genetic mechanisms of drug resistance in glioblastoma, and she plans to go into neurosurgery to pursue a career as a physician-scientist and writer. Her piece, What Remains, was inspired by a series of interviews with glioma patients, who she hopes will be the first of many she is privileged to care for and learn from.

Gialina Morten is a Filipinx-American poet currently based in Brooklyn, New York. She doubles as a publicist for mission-centered leaders in the social impact space. Amplifying stories of progress for those committed to making a more equal and equitable world, is an immense catalyst for Morten’s creative work. Her poetry explores the facets of social cognition; particularly our tendencies toward social and self deception, the ways in which our behavior often contradicts our rhetoric, and how we navigate seemingly irreconcilable beliefs that occupy the same space within us. Her poems have appeared in USC 's Levan Institute for the Humanities: The Social Justice Review, The Indie Memphis Film Festival 2020 and Adwoa Aboah's: Gurls Talk.

Hillary Mullan is a first-year resident physician who is currently training in New York City. She is interested in the ways in which creativity can promote healing. She has found writing helpful in processing the challenging experiences present in medicine and particularly those that come with the transition from student to physician.

Sheila Ojeaburu is a fourth-year medical student at the University of Washington, pursuing her MD and MPH. She received her BA in Neurobiology from Harvard University. She was born in Nigeria and has lived on both coasts of the United States, along with a brief stint in Kenya. She is a creative at her core, and writing is her most illuminating passion. She hopes to become a clinician-researcher, with a specific interest in addressing the health needs of the African diaspora. Ojeaburu, who enjoys indulging her sweets obsession, appreciates the art of curating the perfect playlist.

Katherine A. Panushka is a fourth-year medical student at the University of Utah School of Medicine. She has matched into an Obstetrics and Gynecology residency at Montefiore Medical Center – Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. She was born in Ogden, UT. She received her B.A. in English Literature at Westminster College in Salt Lake City. She is inspired by the complex and often intimate stories that bring patients into her care. These stories motivate her to advocate for reproductive justice, health equity, and comprehensive healthcare. Her poetry has been published in the University of Utah’s fourth-year medical student publication, Voices from the Wards, and the peer-reviewed online publication, Mosaic in Medicine.

Kathryn Paul (Kathy) is a survivor of many things, including cancer and downsizing. Her poems have appeared in Rogue Agent, Hospital Drive, The Ekphrastic Review, Lunch Ticket, Stirring: A Literary Collection, Pictures of Poets and Poets Unite! The LiTFUSE @10 Anthology.
Author photo by Andrew Givhan

Marc Perlman is a second-year medical student at Albany Medical College in Albany, New York in the Class of 2023. In 2019, he graduated from Union College as Salutatorian with a Bachelor of Science in economics and biology. He also holds an MBA in Healthcare Management from Clarkson University. Perlman enjoys reading, writing poetry, and exploring local restaurants. In the future, Perlman hopes to intertwine his medical training with his business experiences to improve the management of chronic diseases.

Mariechen Puchert (she/her) is a Medical Officer in Anaesthesia in South Africa. She completed her MB.ChB at the University of Stellenbosch and currently finds herself in a semi-urban public hospital in the Eastern Cape. A storyteller at heart, Puchert is an alumna of Youth Journalism International, where she gained confidence in writing for an audience, and of the Semester at Sea Spring 2013 voyage, where she first enrolled in a class in Illness Narratives. She has a special interest in pain medicine as well as mental health, and contests the popular opinion of anaesthesiology as an invisible and minimally interactive specialty. Puchert lives and learns in East London, South Africa, with her partner and their four cats.

Jenny Rangan fell in love with clay in college. Over the last decade, she co-founded the Cape Ann Ceramics Festival and partnered in running Lexicon Gallery and Workshops. A native New Mexican, she is influenced by the erosion of adobe and arroyo walls, mesas, big sky and Native American concepts of connectedness and spirituality. Her large-scale ceramic installations have shown in Flying Horse Outdoor Sculpture Shows at Pingree School, Hamilton, MA and at the Newton Festival for the Arts, Newton, MA. Haven is currently installed in the green space behind Common Crow, Gloucester, MA. At present, Jenny is getting an MA in Art Therapy and Clinical Mental Health at Lesley University and has been working in 2D.

Paavani Reddy is a medical student at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, IL. In 2017, she graduated from Northwestern University with a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology, and was named a James Alton James scholar, awarded by the Dean’s Office to three seniors who demonstrated excellence in the social sciences. After graduation, she spent a year in South Korea with the Fulbright Program as a teacher, while also undertaking a research project on a cross-generational analysis of perceptions of mental health with a fellow grantee. As a medical student, she has researched medication adherence in children with chronic illness. She is passionate about health equity, education and the arts.

Lane Robson graduated from the first medical class at the University of Calgary in 1973. He was Head of Pediatric Nephrology and Head of Pediatrics at several Universities and a full professor at Brown University. He served as a volunteer pediatrician in Haiti, Nicaragua and Sierra Leone. He is the author of over six hundred medical articles in peer-reviewed journals. He also published articles on postal history, William Blake, and C.S. Lewis. He won the Geldert medal for philatelic writing in 2011. His book How to Cure Bedwetting helps parents cure bedwetting. His non-medical books include Do You Think You Will Ever Go Back, a collection of short stories that strives to understand human nature.

Allison Rosenbaum is a first-year medical student at Columbia Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. She graduated from Brown University in 2018 with a degree in English and History. She taught 10th grade English at Bronx River High School for one year after she graduated, and then completed a pre-medical postbac at Bryn Mawr College. She is interested in medical ethics, medical humanities, and narrative medicine, and looks forward to incorporating her love of storytelling into her medical education.

Rolando Rubalcava is a third-year  doctoral student, studying literature at Ohio State University. His academic interests include graphic medicine, the intersection of graphic narratives and medical humanities. His academic accomplishments include presenting his research at the International Conference of Narrative and becoming a Global Humanities Fellow. Alongside his studies, he is also the Editor of QuePasa magazine, a student-run magazine focused on Latinx student life at OSU. A California native, he is also a first-generation academic and hopes to pursue a career applying his studies to community activism. To learn more about his academic trajectory, check out his blog, Seeking Infinite Jest: My Road to the PhD (www.seekinginfinitejest.com)

Ronald Ruskin is  a staff psychiatrist at Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto and associate professor in the department of Psychiatry at University of Toronto. He has published three novels, co-edited a textbook of psychotherapy supervision[APA] as well as  a narratives of healing "Body and Soul"[UTP]. Ruskin is a founding editor of Ars Medica, a journal of medical humanities. ronruskin.com

Hanna Saltzman is a resident physician in pediatrics at the University of Utah and an aspiring pediatric rheumatologist. Prior to medical school, she studied anthropology and worked in environmental health advocacy. She is the Deputy Editor of the journal Pediatrics’ Section on Pediatric Trainees. Her essays and op-eds have recently appeared in The Examined Life Journal, Family Medicine, and The Salt Lake Tribune, and can be found at hannasaltzman.com/publications. She lives with her husband in Salt Lake City and can be reached on twitter @hannasaltzman.

Ramya Sampath is a medical student at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry whose interests include global health and social medicine, medical education and creative nonfiction. She was a 2017-2018 Fulbright-Nehru Fellow in India, conducting ethnographic fieldwork on community-based palliative care. Prior to her work in medicine, she collaborated with playwrights, public health experts and historians at universities in Egypt and the United States to improve  She studied Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her creative work has been featured in JAMA and The Lancet.

Steven Scaglione is a third-year medical student and amateur printmaker living and working in Nashville, Tennessee. He plans to pursue residency in the field of pediatrics and is passionate about reflecting on the “front seat to the human condition” that a career in medicine provides. His past work has included photography, prose, and visual art on the power of eye contact in anesthesia, the voices behind contact tracing during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the beauty of H&E stains. A portfolio of his printmaking can be found at artprintsbysteven.bigcartel.com and on Instagram at @stevenscagli_one.

Sylvia  Sensiper is a writer and photographic artist. Her photographs have been  shown  in a solo show at the Else Gallery at Sacramento State University in  California and included in many group exhibitions. She has  published in the academic journals The Journal of Pedagogy, Pluralism and Practice and Children and Youth Services Review. Sensiper is affiliated with UC Davis and teaches meditation and yoga classes at the university.

Karen Elizabeth Sharpe is a poet from Westminster, Massachusetts. She works in higher education, volunteers for nonprofits, and spends most of her time exploring the wild outdoors. Sharpe  is a poetry editor at the Worcester Review, and her poems have appeared in Catalyst, the Mizmor Anthology, Baseball Bard, Verse Virtual, Columbia Journal of Arts & Literature, Canary: The Journal of the Environmental Crisis, Silkworm, and The Comstock Review, among others. Her work  has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and Sharpe is a member of the PoemWorks community of Greater Boston.

Irene Sherlock is a dual-licensed marriage and family therapist and alcohol and drug counselor who lives and practices in Danbury CT.

Danielle Snyderman is an associate professor and geriatrician in the department of family and community medicine at Jefferson in Philadelphia.  She is a co-editor of the Eakins Writers’ Workshop and Evanescent literary journal and serves as the medical director of a continuing care retirement community in the Philadelphia suburbs. She considers herself a story collector and believes that knowing her patients’ stories help her to take better care of them that is consistent with their values.

Nina Solis is a Hematology/Oncology and Covid-19 RN and emerging writer based in Philadelphia, PA. She received her BSN with a minor in Creative Writing from the University of Pennsylvania as a proud first-generation college graduate. Currently she enjoys running, playing guitar, and genuine human connection (at least 6-feet apart). Find her on Twitter and Instagram @bean_solis
Author photo by Sara Joan

Sanjana Sundara Raj Sreenath  is a medical student in the United States. She is particularly interested in digital art, medical humanities, as well as narrative medicine. This piece highlights the multifaceted impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and our relentless fight against it.

Mo Lynn Stoycoff is an autodidactic writer and poet whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Temelo, Rise Up Review, South Broadway Ghost Society, California Quarterly, Speckled Trout Review and many other journals and anthologies. Stoycoff is a longtime activist and was author of the popular Get Off Yer Ass column in Alive n’ Kicking music magazine and has written and performed occasion poems for Women Take Back the Night and other rallies. Stoycoff works in the performing arts and lives on the colonized land of the Patwin people in Central California. Molynnstoycoff.com

Laura Tafe is a physician and collage artist who works as an anatomic and molecular pathologist in New Hampshire. Collage has been the focus of her creative work for the past year and a half.  “I love cutting things up into their basic elements and then reassembling to tell a new story.  It always amazes me what emerges.”  She enjoys sharing her artwork, especially with those in healthcare, and hopes it inspires others to prioritize the things outside of medicine that are important to them, brings joy, and honors themselves as a whole person. Find her on Twitter @LJTafeMD.

Mark ZY Tan is an anaesthetics and intensive care medicine doctor in Northwest England. He writes about patient narratives and professional experiences, drawing influences from history, arts and culture. His recent pieces “Telephone Lament for Coronavirus” and “Letter to Lydia” were broadcast by the BBC. Other pieces have been published in various academic and humanities journals. His professional interests include point of care ultrasound and global health. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Manchester. Dr. Tan  also enjoys playing music, swing dancing, growing mushrooms and gardening. Find more of his work on Medium.com: @mark-zy-tan

Ben Teasdale is a third-year medical student at Stanford University School of Medicine. He is a graduate of the University of Cambridge, where he studied history and philosophy of medicine. Teasdale grew up in Williston, Vermont, where he was raised by and under the specters of Bernie Sanders, a series of Bernese mountain dogs and his loving parents.

Tharshika Thangarasa is a daughter, sister, partner, friend and second year psychiatry resident physician at the University of Toronto.

Wendy Tong is a third-year medical student at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. She has always loved reading and writing, and now she is just beginning to set foot into the world of narrative medicine.

Amy Tubay graduated from Emory University School of Medicine and trained in family medicine and obstetrics at the University of Utah. She has provided full-spectrum primary care to diverse families in three states and two nations, and has taught residents and students at four different academic institutions. Her professional and research interests have ranged almost as widely as her geographic location: from group prenatal care to weight management to physician well-being. She resides in England, where she serves as a volunteer physician for the American Red Cross. 

Kathryn Tubbs’ artwork creates beauty from what is often considered grotesque. She depicts disease, injuries, scars, and the body’s interior and microscopic matter in her mixed media drawings and paintings. Tubbs’ exploration started in graduate school while her family was caring for a terminally ill child relative with cancer. The surprising colors of disease—whether from chemotherapy or diagnostic medical imagery—made a deep impression on her. Non-traditional color choices free her from realism and inject positivity into the imagery. Born in Cypress, CA, she attended Northwestern University in Evanston, IL for an undergraduate art degree, received her MFA in printmaking at CSU Long Beach, and afterwards studied Cultural Studies at Claremont Graduate School. Tubbs currently lives in El Segundo, CA. Ktubbsart.com

Xanthia Tucker is a Medicine-Pediatrics resident at the University of Michigan. Before deciding to become a doctor, she studied comparative literature, theater and creative writing at Harvard College. She dreams of a humanistic and artistic career in medicine, inspired by her childhood idol, William Carlos Williams, and her grandmother, a painter. She also loves to sing, cook, hike and admire her adolescent cats, Pico and Elio.

Claire Unis enrolled in the MFA program at USF, while in medical school at UCSF, where she focused on writing memoir and narrative nonfiction. Now a practicing pediatrician, she also leads Literature in Medicine classes for other clinicians in one of the largest medical groups in northern California. Three other excerpts of her memoir about her experiences in medical school have been published elsewhere, two in anthologies, along with several essays and poems related to the COVID-19  pandemic. More information can be found on Facebook @LiteraryArtinMedicine (Claire Unis MD MFA) and on www.claireunis.net.

Chloe Vaughn, LCSW is a clinical social worker in palliative care. She has an undergraduate degree in literature and creative writing and an interest in storytelling, contemplative practice, and narrative medicine. She lives with her family in Portland, Oregon.

Rodolfo Villarreal-Calderon is from Mexico City and after immigrating to the United States as a child, grew up with one foot on each side of the border, balancing both sides' languages, cultures, and identities. He is currently thoroughly enjoying writing in his spare time while being an internal medicine resident at Boston University Medical Center--where he will continue to stay, as a Medical Education Fellow. He would like to have a dog to warm his feet as he writes but for now as writing companions, has two plants. Which he regularly overwaters. He previously had four plants.

Cole W. Williams is the author of Hear the River Dammed: Poems from the Edge of the Mississippi (Beaver’s Pond Press, 2017) as well as several books for children. Her poems have appeared in Martin Lake Journal, Indolent Books online, Waxing & Waning, Harpy Hybrid Review, WINK and other journals and anthologies. Williams is a student in the MFA program at Augsburg University in Minneapolis. Find out more about her work at colewwilliams.com

Adela Wu, MD is currently a neurosurgery resident physician at Stanford University as well as an artist and writer. Wu is passionate about making connections between ideas and people, particularly in exploring patient and illness experiences. She has regularly published articles and editorial illustrations for multiple campus newspapers and blogs at Brown University, Johns Hopkins, and Stanford and is looking to expand her horizons. Created with watercolors, pencil, and ink, “Macroscopic” portrays the lens with which she sees patients, people who are more than just their diagnoses and diseases.