Keynote Speakers

Core Faculty

Poetry

Prose

Director

Faculty and Speaker’s Bios

Sayantani DasGupta, MD, MPH, is a pediatrician and faculty member of the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University. She also teaches courses in illness narratives and narrative genetics at Sarah Lawrence College. She is the co-author of The Demon Slayers and Other Stories: Bengali Folktales, the author of a memoir of her time at Johns Hopkins Medical School entitled Her Own Medicine: A Woman's Journey from Student to Doctor, and the co-editor of a collection of women's illness narratives, Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write their Bodies. She is the host of a new program on the arts and humanities in medicine on XM 157 Reach MD—the first national radio station for medical professionals.

Cortney Davis, a nurse practitioner, is co-editor of two anthologies of nurses' writing. She authored a memoir, I Knew a Woman: the Experience of the Female Body (Random House 2001) and three poetry collections, most recently Leopold's Maneuvers, winner of the Prairie Schooner Poetry Prize. She has been awarded an NEA poetry fellowship, three Connecticut Commission on the Arts poetry grants, the Center for the Book non-fiction prize, and three Pushcart nominations. Her essay collection, Letters to a YoungNurse: Essays on the Art of Nursing is forthcoming from Kent State University Press. She is the poetry editor of Alimentum, a journal of poetry and prose about food.  Additional information about Davis and her work can be found on her web site.

Donald Hall received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard College and a bachelor’s in literature from Oxford University. He has published 15 books of poetry, including his latest, White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006. He has also written 20 books of prose, children’s books, and plays. He received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for his poetry book The One Day (1988). He was the United States Poet Laureate from 2006-2007

Marie Howe received her M.F.A. from Columbia University. She is the author of, most recently, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (March 2008, WW Norton), What The Living Do (1998, WW Norton) as well as The Good Thief (1987, Persea Books), selected by Margaret Atwood for the National Poetry Series. She is the editor, with Michael Klein, of In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. She has received numerous awards including the Mary Ingram Bunting fellowship from Radcliffe College and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, and the Guggenheim.

Dave King's debut novel, The Ha-Ha, was named one of the best books of 2005 by The Christian Science Monitor and The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and was among eighteen books included on The Washington Post’s list of the season's best novels. The Ha-Ha was a finalist for Book-of-the-Month Club's "Best Literary Fiction" award and the Quills Foundation "Best Debut Author" award and won King a 2006-07 Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. King's poetry has been published in The Paris Review, among other venues, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He has taught English at Baruch College and cultural studies and poetry at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He divides his time between Brooklyn and the Hudson Valley of New York.

Richard Selzer is a retired General Surgeon, and the author of a dozen volumes of short stories, essays, memoirs, plays, and diaries. His most recent book is The Whistlers' Room: Stories and Essays. His work has been translated into a number of languages and been performed in theatre and ballet. He has received the usual number of awards and honorary degrees.

David Watts's next book of stories concerning the practice of medicine will be published by U. Iowa Press in early 2009. Bedside Manners was published by Random House in 2005. He has authored four books of poetry, including Taking the History, published by Nightshade Press. He is a gastroenterologist, a classically trained musician, a television host and producer, and inventor of a medical device to assist in the prevention of colon cancer. He co-produced Healing Words, a one hour documentary which explores the use of poetry in a medical setting, which will air on PBS in July 2008, and he is a regular commentator on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” He is currently working on a novel.

Penny Wolfson won a National Magazine Award in 2001 for her essay “Moonrise” and is the author of a memoir of the same name. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Good Housekeeping, The Washington Post, and Print magazine and in the anthologies Best American Essays, 2002; Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write Their Bodies, and in the forthcoming Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs. She teaches nonfiction writing at Sarah Lawrence.