Poetry Within Illness: Reading by Rafael Campo, Martha Collins, Steven Cramer - RSVP Required

Date: 

Monday, May 5, 2014, 5:00pm to 6:00pm

Location: 

Harvard Medical School, Gordon Hall, Waterhouse Room, 25 Shattuck Street, Boston, MA

The event is free, but RSVP is required. (reception to follow)

RAFAEL CAMPO, M.A., M.D., D. Litt., is a poet and essayist who teaches and practices internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He is also on the faculty of Lesley University’s Creative Writing MFA Program. He is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Poetry Series award, and a Lambda Literary Award for his poetry; his third collection of poetry, Diva (Duke University Press, 2000), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Enemy (DUP, 2007), won the Sheila Motton Book Award from the New England Poetry Club, one of the nation’s oldest poetry organizations. In 2009, he received the Nicholas E. Davies Memorial Scholar Award from the American College of Physicians, for outstanding humanism in medicine; he has also won the 2013 Hippocrates Open International Prize, one of the highest value awards for a single poem in the world, for original verse that addresses a medical theme. His work has also been selected for inclusion in the Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthology series, and has appeared in many periodicals including The Nation, The New Republic, the New York Times Magazine, Paris Review, Poetry, Salon.com, Slate.com, and the Washington Post Book World. Dr. Jerome Groopman, writing in the New York Times Book Review, says of his work, “Valuable and moving . . . he is undaunted by the ugliness of the physical deterioration apparent before his eyes, seeking always to capture the beauty of the human soul in struggle with physical reality;” The Los Angeles Times calls it “Reminiscent of Chekhov . . . in the way language comes up out of the body.” His newest book Alternative Medicine (DUP, 2013) has recently been the subject of stories on the PBS NewsHour and in Harvard Magazine.

MARTHA COLLINS is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Day Unto Day (Milkweed, 2014), White Papers (Pittsburgh, 2012), and Blue Front (Graywolf, 2006). She has also published three collections of cotranslated Vietnamese poetry, most recently Black Stars: Poems by Ngo Tu
Lap (Milkweed, 2013). Her awards include fellowships from the NEA, the Bunting Institute, and the Siena Art Institute, as well as three Pushcart Prizes and an Anisfield-Wolf Award. Founder of the creative writing program at UMass-Boston, she served as Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative
Writing at Oberlin College until 2007 and as Distinguished Visiting Writer at Cornell University in 2010. She is currently editor-at-large for FIELD Cornell University in 2010. She is currently editor-at-large for FIELD magazine and one of the editors of the Oberlin College Press.

STEVEN CRAMER is the author of five poetry collections: The Eye that Desires to Look Upward (1987); The World Book (1992); Dialogue for the Left and Right Hand (1997); Goodbye to the Orchard (2004), which won the 2005 Sheila Motton Prize from the New England Poetry Club, and was named a 2005 Honor Book in Poetry by the Massachusetts Center for the Book; and Clangings (2012). His poems and criticism have appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Partisan Review, Poetry, and Triquarterly; as well as in The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poets and The POETRY Anthology, 1912–2002. He directs the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at
Lesley University in Cambridge.

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See also: 2014