Simran Anand is a rising junior at Boston University majoring in cell and molecular biology with a specialization in genetics. Anand aspires to become a surgeon, driven by a commitment to uniting technical precision with the human side of healing. Her experiences with surgery as a child shaped her fascination with the role of the surgeon as both healer and guide. She has conducted research in protein biochemistry and translational neuroscience, but finds equal meaning in exploring medicine through art. Working primarily in charcoal, Anand uses visual storytelling to reflect on resilience, care, and the patient experience. She believes art reveals dimensions of medicine often unseen in data and clinical notes, and hopes to carry that perspective into her future as a surgeon.

Ira Bagga is a junior at Arizona College Prep High School with a passion for the arts and the sciences. Bagga discovered an interest in visual art in elementary school and has since used it as a way to explore self-expression, cultural identity, and storytelling. Bagga is deeply interested in health and medicine, with a focus on building bridges between science and creativity to increase awareness and empathy and using creative expression as a way to inspire dialogue and community impact. Her local initiative, the Athena Project, brings arts to underserved places.

Ann Bebensee is a retired neurologist and writer. Her work appears on The Keepthings. She lives in California with her husband and Bernese Mountain Dog.

Photo by Gigi Kraus

Jonathan Bock is a third-year medical student at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Originally from small-town Kansas, Bock studied philosophy and biochemistry as an undergraduate. His eventual medical specialty is undetermined, but he hopes to use his educational background to incorporate the power of storytelling and the varied contributions of the world's great thinkers into his future practice.

Dena Brownstein is a retired pediatric emergency physician, mother of two adults, writer and community activist. Family, career and aging are the topics that inform her forays in creative non-fiction. Brownstein lives in the Pacific Northwest, and splits her time between Seattle and Lopez Island in the Salish Sea. Both landscapes feed her soul.

DeMarcus Burke is a second-year medical student at the University of Michigan, where he is pursuing the Humanities Path of Excellence. He holds a degree in philosophy from Morehouse College. His creative work draws on themes of family, memory, and the emotional dimensions of caregiving. In 2025, Burke was named a finalist for the Rattle Poetry Prize. His poetry has appeared in Auxocardia and is forthcoming in Rattle. He writes to honor the stories that often go unheard in medicine.

Wayan Buschman lives on the high plains of Colorado. She is captivated by desolate landscapes, old-time banjo music, and hand-drawn animation. During a five-year interim of worsening chronic pain, later revealed to be Lyme Disease, she discovered the field of narrative medicine. The genre helped her better understand her own condition, through the experiences of others. See more of her work at wayan buschman.

Matthew Canonico is from Nashville, Tennessee. He is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and is a fourth-year medical student at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. Canonico is passionate about the narrative and humanistic aspects of medicine. His recent diagnosis of type 1 diabetes has provided him a unique and deeply personal perspective on the patient experience. Canonico is pursuing a career in internal medicine.

Ellen Chang is a researcher and storyteller who graduated from Harvard Medical School’s Media, Medicine, and Health program. She studied Biology of Global Health at Georgetown University and has worked at Stanford University and Massachusetts General Hospital. Chang’s writing and research center on mental health, illness narratives, and the lived experiences of immigrant communities.

Shaoli Chaudhuri is an internist based in the South. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Lily, and narrative medicine journals.

Faith Galliano Desai is a psychologist and writer whose work explores the intersections of emotion, the nervous system, trauma, and the body’s innate capacity for healing. Galliano Desai brings a background in holistic approaches to wellness and a deep curiosity about how stories move through us as energy. Her essays often weave lived experience with reflections on grief, anxiety, and the ways the body expresses what the mind cannot. She is at work on a collection of essays that trace the movement of feeling from wound to restoration.

Julia Dobner-Pereira (she/they) is a psychologist, drama therapist, and artist, writes poetry and prose and creates auto-ethnographic therapeutic theater, most recently about illness as a spiritual portal. Her clinical work and research involve integrating drama therapy with attachment-based interpersonal approaches to therapy, queering psychotherapy, and improving systems to promote trauma-informed, liberated health care. Dobner-Pereira loves spending time with her family and extended dear ones, including their diva calico cat, Joni. They also enjoy singing, exploring the natural world, and gathering.

Rebecca Dun-Roseman is a first-year medical student at Northeast Ohio Medical University.

Rebecca Efroymson, a writer of creative nonfiction, is based in Asheville, North Carolina. She lives a double life, clinging to her federal environmental science career, with its wonderful people, in these challenging times. Her lovely kids have fledged, leaving more room for writing. She has been in the care of physicians and physical therapists on many occasions, and a side benefit has been lots of material for literary pieces. Efroymson incorporates science in much of her work. She received the Leslie Garrett Award for Literary Fiction from the Knoxville Writer’s Guild. She grew up in Philadelphia and its suburbs and has a BA in biology and English from La Salle University and an MS and PhD in environmental toxicology from Cornell University.

Homa Fathi is a doctoral researcher at the faculty of dental medicine and oral health sciences at McGill University. Her scholarly work focuses on improving access to oral healthcare for people with disabilities, advancing decolonization in dentistry and promoting social dentistry as a framework for addressing health inequities. She also engages in projects that integrate biopsychosocial and narrative approaches into dental education, exploring how transformative learning, storytelling and reflective practice can foster empathy and patient-centered care. Trained as a general dentist, Fathi brings clinical experience to her academic work, bridging theory and practice. She is committed to developing more inclusive, humanistic, and socially responsive models of dental care that recognize and address the social determinants influencing oral health outcomes.

Valk Fisher writes non-fiction, poetry and children's books, often on the subject of body. She runs writing-for-wellbeing workshops and is a PhD researcher at the University of Lisbon in writing-for-wellbeing applications in narrative medicine. She is finishing a memoir on illness, motherhood and care. More work can be found at valkfisher.com and the Broken Body Love Letters Project, an initiative that invites first-hand narrative of life with long-term illness/disability or follow  @bbodyloveletters.

Laura Gilligan is a third-year pediatric resident in San Diego, California, planning to specialize in gastroenterology.

Johanna (Hana) Glaser is a palliative care physician. She studied philosophy at Pomona College, moved to Ghana to help establish a women’s leadership development nonprofit, and worked as a family planning assistant at Planned Parenthood in Oregon. Glaser also took time off during medical school at UCSF to conduct research about end-of-life care for underserved women in the Bay Area and to complete an introductory training in Buddhist chaplaincy. She went on to complete internal medicine residency at UCSF and hospice and palliative medicine fellowship at Stanford. Outside of medicine she loves quality time with friends and family, screen-free days with a paintbrush, long hikes near cold alpine lakes and her two wily kittens.

Moshe Gordon is a second-year medical student at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Zoya Gurm is a poet and resident physician at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Her writing has appeared in Contemporary Verse II, Clearline magazine, and zines from Flower Press, Minto Press, and Room Project. Her debut chapbook is Antiparallel in the River.

Alyse Keller Johnson, PhD, is a writer and associate professor of communication studies at CUNY Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, NY. Her work lives at the intersection of story and embodiment, exploring how narrative can create spaces of healing, connection, and reflection. Much of her inspiration comes from her own and her family’s experiences with illness and disability, particularly multiple sclerosis, and from her own journey of learning to hold grief through storytelling. She facilitates workshops that invite others to share their own narratives of health and illness. More about her projects, performances and writing can be found at www.alysekellerjohnson.com.

Layla Joudeh is a Syrian-American obstetrician-gynecology resident at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She leans on writing and reading to help her process the ups and downs of her medical career.

Pallavi Kenkare is a third-year medical student at Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine. She graduated from Cornell University in 2021, where she served as opinion editor for the Cornell Daily Sun. Before medical school, she worked as a journalist for CNET and ZDNET. She hails from Atlanta, Georgia.

Solomon Kim is a fourth-year medical student at California Northstate University College of Medicine, currently completing a research year. Kim's writing explores healthcare disparities and patient advocacy, drawing from personal experiences with the medical system. His work seeks to give voice to marginalized patients, particularly those experiencing homelessness and mental illness. Kim is interested in psychiatry and narrative medicine as tools for systemic change.

Lisa Simone Kingstone is the author of Fading Out Black and White, which was featured on BBC Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed. A 2025 Rockower award winner for excellence in personal essay, her work has appeared in The Hartford Courant, Shooter Literary Magazine, PW, Hadassah Magazine, Patterns of Prejudice, Lilith, The Linden Review, and Months to Years. A former literature professor at King’s College London, Kingstone lives in Montclair, New Jersey with her husband.

Aidan Kunju is a third-year medical student at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. His academic interests bridge neurology, ethics, and the medical humanities, with work spanning clinical research on Parkinson’s disease, narrative medicine, and the ethics of emerging technologies. Kunju was a recipient of the Paul Kalanithi Writing Award 2023 for his poetry. Beyond medicine, he engages in creative writing and the visual arts as ways of reflecting on patient care and the human condition.

Serge Lecomte was born in Belgium in 1946. He came to the States where he spent his teens in South Philly and then Brooklyn. After graduating from Tilden H. S. he joined the Medical Corps in the Air Force. He earned an MA and Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in Russian Literature with a minor in French Literature. He worked as a Green Beret language instructor at Fort Bragg, NC from 1975-78. In 1988 he received a B.A. from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in Spanish literature. He worked as a language teacher at the University of Alaska (1978-1997). He worked as a house builder, pipe-fitter, orderly in a hospital, gardener, landscaper, driller for an assaying company, bartender and painter.

Oscar Kopljar is an Oxford educated poet and translator with a deep interest in grief, suffering, and the ways in which we endure them. He lives alone deep in a swampy forest in Sweden, where he spends his days rewilding

Annette Leddy is a fiction writer and author of the novel Earth Still. Leddy, who is also an oral historian for artist foundations, held the position of New York Collector for the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art. She has published essays and reviews on artists connected to Surrealism, Futurism, or Conceptual Art, and co-authored Farewell to Surrealism: the Dyn Circle in Mexico.

Elli Youngeun Lee is a painter and third-year medical student at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. She graduated from Brown University with a degree in visual arts in 2022. Lee gleans inspiration from her daily life and on her clinical rotations, hoping to put onto canvas the fleeting but poignant moments of the mundane.

Elaine Liu is a homo sapiens who draws inspiration from her experiences living on both sides of the Pacific, often drawing on her experiences as an EMT, hospice worker, ER scribe and aspiring physician. Her poetry has appeared in EPOCH, Tendon, Stone Poetry Quarterly, Bellingham Review and Folio. She is forever grieving the souls lost in Unit 731.
POETRY: How To Tell If You're in a Ghost Story

Sujal Manohar lives and thrives at the intersection of the arts and sciences. Manohar has designed collaborative murals in health care settings, taught art to individuals with intellectual disabilities, and led art gallery tours for adults with dementia. She holds degrees in neuroscience and visual arts from Duke University and an MD from Baylor College of Medicine. She is a neurology resident at the University of Pennsylvania.

Mariana Mcdonald (she, her, they) is a poet, writer, public health scientist, and activist. Her poetry, fiction, essays, and journalism have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Crab Orchard Review, Ceasefire Now!, Sargasso, Antología de la Poesía Viequense, About Place Journal, and Anthology of Southern Poets: Georgia. She co-authored Dominga Rescues the Flag about Puerto Rican heroine Dominga de la Cruz. She was named a Black Earth Institute Scholar/Fellow in 2022. She lives in Atlanta.

Robert McEachern is a cancer advocate and writer. His work has appeared in JCO Oncology Practice, KevinMD, Blood-Cancer.org, Lymphoma News Today, Lyfebulb, The Mighty and CURE Today.

Cynthia Miller, MD, MPH, consults for life science firms in the area of market access. She is a thought leader in the healthcare space with publications in the Medical Care Blog, Physicians Practice, and Healthcare Business Today. She lives in the mountains of North Carolina with her husband and 7-pound toy schnauzer. In addition to reading and writing, she enjoys visiting bookstores, hiking, yoga, and Pilates.

Mariana Ndrio is a third-year psychiatry resident based in Connecticut. Driven by a deep curiosity about the human mind, she explores the multifaceted human psyche through various forms of artistic expression. Through her art, she aims to bridge the gap between medicine and the human experience, drawing inspiration from daily clinical encounters and inner life experiences as a physician in training. Her work has also appeared in New Physician Magazine and Pulse Voices

Christine Nguyen has performed her work live in San Francisco with Back Pocket Media and at LitCrawl Sebastopol. She won journalism awards from the Asian American Journalists Association, the Society of Professional Journalists-NorCal, and the San Francisco Press Club. She was born in Vietnam and practices medicine in San José, California.

Madison 'Sonni' Palmer is a queer, mixed-race Filipinx writer who holds a BS from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is studying at Stanford Medical School. She writes to heal.

Tulsi Patel is an internal medicine resident at the University of California, San Diego. Born and raised in Chicago, Patel ventured to the East Coast for college and received a degree from Columbia University, where she developed an appreciation for both poetry and humanistic care. She enjoys hiking with friends, staring at art, and raising her cat.

Mark E. Paull was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes in 1967 at age eleven. He has lived through nearly six decades of diabetes care evolution, from boiled glass syringes to modern technology. In the early 1980s, he worked as a diabetes educator, helping patients and families navigate chronic illness management. Paull has completed CME-accredited training in Type 1 Diabetes care and reviews manuscripts for Diabetes Care, and works as an educator and coach. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, Folklife, CHADD's Attention Magazine, The Good Men Project, Breakthrough T1D Canada, and The Times of Israel.

Evelyn M. Potochny, DO is an associate professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, Hershey, PA.

Lauren Rose Reyes is a researcher, poet and bead worker, who comes from a long line of healers. At Stanford University, she studied human biology and science communication while integrating cultural knowledge into health advocacy work and cardiology research. Reyes carries her Mexican, Diné (Navajo), and Nde (Mescalero Apache) heritage with her throughout her work. Beyond pursuing a career as a physician, the creative and cultural arts are key components of her life. Culture intertwined with science is a common theme throughout her creative practice and writings. Reyes is a storyteller, cultivating awareness and understanding towards her people and others who are underserved.

Rebecca Ripperton is a neurology resident at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. She received her medical degree from the University of Colorado School of Medicine and her undergraduate degree from St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. Her interests include medical education, narrative medicine, the humanities, and improving care for patients in carceral settings.

Nathan Rockey is a primary care physician in Colorado. He likes to read and write about medicine and is working on a nonfiction piece about his medical training. His favorite piece of writing is an unpublished poem his dad wrote called “The Last Fact.”

Esha Sawant is a third-year medical student at Stony Brook University. She is from New York, but completed her undergraduate education at Dalhousie University in medical sciences with a minor in Russian studies and intercultural communication. Sawant, who is passionate about art as a way to create intentional space for reflection and to capture striking moments in medicine, is also inspired by folk modes of storytelling that bring beauty into the everyday through song, dance, painting and textile work. Her artwork has appeared in the RSOM Anastomoses Journal.

Joanna Sharpless is a palliative care physician at the University of California, San Francisco, who searches for healing through reading and writing. She is a graduate of the Program in Liberal Medical Education at Brown University, earning a BA in English Literature and a medical degree. Her work has appeared in Time magazine, Pulse Voices, Academic Medicine, Journal of Pain and Symptom Management, and the Journal of General Internal Medicine. She lives north of San Francisco, where she loves to enjoy tasty pastries under the redwoods with her husband and daughter.

Andrew Suchan is a motility and neurogastroenterology fellow with Johns Hopkins, having just graduated residency in internal medicine at Johns Hopkins Bayview. He loves going to concerts, playing volleyball, discussing music, and writing narrative medicine stories about the emotional experience of work and training.

Annunziata Tricarico is a contemporary artist, curator, and marketing professional. With over 20 years of experience, she has collaborated with leading companies and agencies, including Saatchi & Saatchi, managing high-profile campaigns for global brands. Originally from Italy, she holds a Master’s degree in Conservation of Cultural Heritage. After formative years in Brussels, which shaped her professional and artistic path, she has been living in Abu Dhabi since 2019.

Ron Turker started in the ’80s as a standup comic and medical student. Through a series of nonlinear events, he became a pediatric surgeon by day and a writer by night. Thirty years of caring for kids at home and worldwide have shaped, sharpened, and ground his sensibilities into a resolute yet witty voice for healthcare change and equity in the U.S. He is the author of the award-winning satirical novel, The Wandering Jew of St. Salacious, his love letter to medicine written with a very sharp pen.

Rebecca Tuttle is an emergency physician and educator in Portland, Oregon. When not taking care of veterans, she spends time having adventures with her two young children. She enjoys dining out with her husband, listening to audiobooks, and competing on nationally televised game shows. She is immensely grateful for the moments of human connection that occur at the bedside, whether with hearing patient stories in the emergency department or tucking in her daughters at night.

Lindsey Ulin is a palliative care physician and assistant professor of medicine at UT Southwestern Medical Center, and storyteller. Her writing is featured in ABC News, Good Morning America, The Boston Globe, and STAT News. Ulin has been a guest commentator for NBC Nightly News, US News & World Report, The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, Yahoo Life, and Cancer Today.

Elizabeth Upton is a fourth-year medical student at Sidney Kimmel Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. Upton holds a MS in narrative medicine from Columbia University and a BA in fine arts from Swarthmore College. She has additional training in oil painting from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, PA.

*In Progress: Not yet published

Austin Valido is a resident physician living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Originally from southern Florida, he was taught in primary school to evade alligators using a zig-zag maneuver, since, he remembers the reasoning explained, “They aren’t good at turns.” Experts now recommend running as straight and fast as possible.

P.X. Vayalumkal is a Canadian-born ER physician wholives with his wife and children just north of Toronto. He is an assistant clinical professor in the School of Medicine at Toronto Metropolitan University. His short story, "A Shadow in the Dark," will appear in Blood + Honey.

Angus Woodward was raised by southerners in the Midwest and moved to Louisiana half a lifetime ago. His books of fiction are Down at the End of the River, Americanisation and Oily. Recent comics have appeared in the Rumpus, Shenandoah, Heavy Feather Review, the Florida Review and Slag Glass City. Woodward writes, illustrates and teaches in Baton Rouge.

Noah Todd Wooten is a poet whose work explores trauma, mental health, and survival. His poetry collection The Empty Urge documents his journey through childhood abuse, family loss, and psychiatric treatment. Wooten's work draws from his lived experience with bipolar disorder, grief, providing insightful testimony about experiences often marginalized in contemporary literature.

Victoria Yuan (she/her) is a third-year medical student and Sarnoff Fellow at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine. She graduated from Stanford University, where she majored in biomedical computation, minored in classics, and produced podcasts with the Stanford Storytelling Project. With interests in data science and art, Yuan is drawn to the numbers and narratives of medicine, lending context and color to statistics through patient stories.

Joseph Zarconi is the distinguished university professor emeritus at the Northeast Ohio Medical University in Rootstown, Ohio, where he recently retired as clinical director for health humanities education. He is a retired nephrologist and active educator, Zarconi, who is co-author of two books on narrative in health care, co-authored peer-reviewed work on topics relating to medical education, narrative medical practice, narrative ethics, humanism and professionalism, cultural consciousness, close reading, and social justice. A member of the NEOMED Master Teacher Guild, Zarconi has been recognized as a Master Teacher by the American College of Physicians.

Madison Zhao is an artist and medical illustrator whose work bridges the visual arts and the health sciences. She has illustrated multiple books with Routledge and Oxford University Press, including projects on neuroaesthetics and social-emotional learning, and has created murals and paintings for hospitals, clinics, and wellbeing centers through her organization Paint4Strength. Her work has been exhibited in venues such as the Bayou City Art Festival and featured in academic publications, and she has collaborated with physicians, researchers, and community organizations internationally to create art that supports healing, patient education, and cross-cultural dialogue. Find more of her work here.