Marco Ammatelli is an undergraduate at the University of Washington majoring in Painting and Drawing. Ammatelli, whose work concerns figurative realism, maintains a commitment to assessing critical social issues that alter landscapes of health, whether of human populations or the encompassing environment. His inquiries have stretched from the opioid epidemic to implications of technology in medicine to narratives of displacement in Seattle’s Central District. When time allows, he enjoys cycling, quiet spaces and slack lining with friends. Studio Art: Electronic Propinquity: Early Prognosis

Ingrid Andersson is a full-time midwife and poet in Madison, WI. She is completing her first collection of poetry, entitled, Down the Female Ages. Her writing has appeared in The Progressive magazine, About Place journal, Midwest Review and Wisconsin Poets' Calendar.

Dianne Avey lives in the Pacific Northwest where she is a fifth generation islander on Anderson Island. She writes poetry where she can, often on the ferry while commuting to her work as a Family Nurse Practitioner. Her poems and essays have appeared in Wrist Magazine, Pulse, Oasis, More Voices and several anthologies. Her first chapbook, “Impossible Ledges" was recently named a top ten finalist in The Poetry Box Annual Chapbook Contest. Her poetry is intentionally accessible, often using her natural seaside surroundings as inspiration.

Kany Aziz is a third year Internal Medicine and Pediatric resident at West Virginia University. She completed her undergraduate and medical school at Florida State University. She was featured in the Fall 2017 issue of the Intima journal. She enjoys writing when she's not seeing patients. Her interests include traveling, tea drinking, and palliative care.

Lisa Alexander Baron is the author of four poetry collections, including While She Poses (Aldrich P, 2015), prompted by visual art. “The Tunnel” is a dramatic monologue, which is part of a play in progress exploring living and healing at a turn of the 20th-century Tuberculosis Sanatorium. Baron’s poems appear in Chautauqua, Confrontation, Fourth River, Potomac Review, and Philadelphia Stories. She is an MFA graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts and teaches rhetoric, including health care advocacy, at Lehigh County Community College and Lasalle University in Philadelphia.

Anna Belc was born and raised in Warsaw, attended middle and high school in New York City, and as an adult fell in love with the Philadelphia area, where she studied theater and later nursing. Currently she is living in Marquette in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where she works as an RN in a rural emergency department. Anna, who is the mother of three boys, is a playwright and translator of dramatic works. She is determined to see the Northern Lights before she heads back east next year.

Ryan Brewster is a second year MD candidate at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Among his professional interests include medical illustration, data visualization and more broadly, communicating the human experience of health and disease through storytelling and the visual arts. "Inside" is a self-portrait challenging the emotional detachment that pervades medical training and practice. “As a self-defense mechanism, I often distance myself from the patient before me. This, however, comes at the expense of embracing my own vulnerability, insecurity and humanity - the heart of my calling to medicine.”

Michael Brown is an optometrist who has practiced with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs for over 25 years and served as an adjunct clinical professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Optometry. He contributes a regular column to Optometry Times and serves on its Editorial Advisory Board. His creative non-fiction work has also appeared in The Huntsville Times and Arkansas Times. For him, writing is a two-way lifeline that enables him to extend better care to his patients and to receive encouragement and hope from their stories. He lives in Huntsville, Alabama.

Jack Coulehan is a physician and medical educator whose stories and poetry appear frequently in medical journals and literary magazines. He is the author of six collections of poetry, including most recently The Wound Dresser, which Robert Pinsky selected as a finalist for the 2016 Dorset Prize (Tupelo Press). In 2012 he received the Nicholas Davies Scholar Award of the American College of Physicians for “outstanding lifetime contributions to humanism in medicine.”

Thomas J. Doyle MD is an internist who lives in Providence, Rhode Island. He graduated from The Warren Alpert School of Medicine at Brown University in 2003 and completed training in internal medicine at Rhode Island Hospital. He practices inpatient hospital medicine at Charlton Memorial Hospital in Fall River, MA.

Suzanne Edison MA, MFA, writes most often about the intersection of illness, healing, medicine and art. She has a child living with Juvenile Myositis. Her chapbook, The Moth Eaten World, was published by Finishing Line Press. She has been awarded grants from Artist Trust; Seattle City Artists, and 4Culture of King County, Seattle. Poems are forthcoming in About Place Journal; Other poetry can be found in: JAMA; SWWIM; What Rough Beast; Bombay Gin; The Naugatuck River Review; The Ekphrastic Review; and in several anthologies including The Healing Art of Writing, Volume One. She is a board member of the Cure JM Foundation and teaches writing workshops at Seattle Children’s Hospital and Richard Hugo House in Seattle. www.seedison.com

Charlotte Friedman, MFA MS (Narrative Medicine, Columbia University) teaches Introduction to Narrative Medicine in the English Department at Barnard College and conducts workshops for clinicians, caregivers and patients. Her work has been published in Reflexions, Light: A Journal of Photography & Poetry, and the Connecticut River Review. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey, with her teenage son and husband.

Alexandra Godfrey is a graduate from Wayne State University where she received a Master’s degree in Physician Assistant Studies. She completed an emergency medicine fellowship and now works in two community emergency departments in western North Carolina. Previously, Alexandra worked as a PT in Britain, where she was born and raised and has worked as an author and columnist for the Journal of the American Academy of Physician Assistants and the New England Journal of Medicine. Her writing has appeared in journals, including Confluence, Cell2Soul, The Healing Muse, Pulse, and Blood and Thunder. She was awarded the American College of Emergency Physicians’ writing award in 2017.

Raina Griefer creates artwork that takes a critical view on mental health, sexual assault, and relationships, all fitting into the overarching theme of vulnerability. Her philosophy is that art is about allowing yourself to be vulnerable and putting out your own feelings to be heard and interpreted by someone else. The often childlike, messy style of her designs mirror the difficulties of letting go when emerging into adulthood and the feelings of being incompetent and clueless that come with that growth. She uses her own personal experiences, with the ultimate goal to use the vulnerability derived from her art to connect to the viewer and allow them to feel her own truths. Currently she is experimenting with paper mache and working on her art collective sleepwalkersartcollective.org

Pamela Hart is writer in residence at the Katonah Museum of Art where she teaches and manages the Museum’s Thinking Through the Arts program. Rowan Ricardo Phillips selected her book, Mothers Over Nangarhar, for the 2017 Kathryn A. Morton Prize. It will be published in 2019 by Sarabande Books. She was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowship. She received the Brian Turner Literary Arts prize and her poems have been published in the Southern Humanities Review, Bellevue Literary Review and elsewhere. Toadlily Press published her chapbook, The End of the Body. She is poetry editor for the Afghan Women’s Writing Project and for As You Were: The Military Review.

Elisabeth Hedrick-Moser, a native of El Paso, TX, lives in San Antonio, where she explores the city and the surrounding hill country with her two daughters and husband. She earned a doctorate in English Literature from Saint Louis University and has published academic essays on war literature, trauma, and teaching. Currently, Elisabeth is writing a series of essays meditating on experiences of motherhood through the paradigm of pilgrimage. One of these, “Speed and Space of Mind” was recently published in Lucia journal; another, “Pilgrim, Mother,” was recently a finalist in Talking Writing’s Writing and Faith contest.

Jesse Holth is a freelance writer and editor based in the Pacific Northwest. She writes about health and wellness, science, history, and conservation, and her work has been featured in over a dozen international publications. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Marathon Literary Review, Mantra Review, Barzakh Magazine, Eastern Iowa Review, and others. She is currently working on two full-length collections.

Gary Hunter is 61 years old, married, with three adult children and four grandchildren. He lives in Comber, Northern Ireland and worked as a journalist until he medically retired in 2012. He recently graduated from Queens University Belfast, with a Master of Arts degree in Creative Writing. He is living with cancer and volunteers with several local cancer charities. Hunter has had several short stories published and is currently working on a memoir. He's a major fan of the Fall group and the late Mark E Smith.

Reha Kumar is a medical student at the University of Toronto (Class of 2019). She is an enthusiast of art, literature, food and travel, and a firm believer in the humanities as a medium for both self-reflection and connection with others. She has a particular interest in exploring models for integration of humanities-based teaching into medical curricula.

Elizabeth Lahti is a teaching hospitalist and Director of Narrative Medicine at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, Oregon. She writes poetry, short fiction, and creative non-fiction, with a focus on the experience of illness from multiple perspectives. In 2015 she co-founded the Northwest Narrative Medicine Collaborative, an organization dedicated to bringing healthcare providers, patients, caregivers, and artists together to better understand the multiple perspectives of health and illness through narrative. Her work has been featured in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, the Annals of Internal Medicine, and the Elohi Gadugi Journal. Two of her short stories have received honorable mention from Glimmer Train.

Ron Lands is a hematologist on the clinical faculty at the University of Tennessee Medical Center, Knoxville, Tennessee and a graduate of Queens University of Charlotte MFA program. His fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in literary publications and the humanities sections of several medical journals. “My vocation and avocation blend nicely. I can't do one without the other.”

Yu Li is a graduate of Tufts University and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She currently works on drug allergy research at Massachusetts General Hospital as a research assistant. She has co-authored multiple publications utilizing epidemiologic methods to study the economic impacts, health outcomes, and quality of life associated with allergy. Her research interest involves using population-level data and statistical methodologies to make clinically relevant inferences and improve patient outcomes.

Anna Martin is a visual artist and writer, native to Baltimore, Maryland, and now living in Salt Lake City, Utah. She is an avid explorer whose artwork is inspired by her travels; her work is also influenced by nature and science. Martin’s work has been exhibited at the Rosenberg Gallery, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, NY and been published in art magazines such as Grub Street, Litro, Green Writer’s Press, and Plenilune Magazine. Martin also works under the pseudonym Vacantia. vacantia.org

Hillary Mullan is a third year medical student at the University of Massachusetts. She is interested in the intersection of art and medicine and likes thinking about how creativity can promote healing. Much of her work involves the use of cut paper to communicate the complexity and beauty of the human body.

Chris Naff writes literary, young adult fiction, and poetry. She is currently writing her first novel, When Papinette Spoke for God, as well as a collection of short stories, When Last We Spoke. Previously, Chris was an MBA/consultant and a development coach and founded and co-wrote the blog HumanKindMedia. Chris is a member of AWP and SCBWI, an alumna of Vermont Studio Center Residency program for Writers, and studied with Richard Bausch.

Maddie Norris is an MFA candidate at the University of Arizona in creative nonfiction and was previously the Thomas Wolfe Scholar at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her writing explores loss, the body, and the many ways to illuminate the two. She is currently at work on a collection of essays.

Ocean is a disabled poet and novelist living in the mists of the northwest coast. His poetry and fiction is known for its resuscitation of the mythic and its contribution to hypnogogic literary animism. He first learned about writing when his mother handed him a crayon; ever since, he has loved to stare out at the sea.

Makoto Ogawa is a resident physician at Mount Sinai West. He has a fondness for coffee shops, cartoons and anatomy. His published work can be found at Vanderbilt’s “The Nashville Review,” and Harvard Medical School’s, “Thirdspace Journal.” You can find his more recent work on his blog at doodledoodleonthewall.com

Ansel Oommen is a clinical laboratory scientist-in-training at St. Joseph's College/New York Methodist Hospital Center for Allied Health Education and a research assistant for the Research Foundation for Mental Hygiene at CUMC/NYSPI. He is also a voluntary research assistant at the New York Botanical Garden.

Heli Patel is a student in the Penn State/SKMC accelerated BS/MD program. Through her journey in the fields of cancer, neuroscience, and surgery, she seeks to capture the narratives of the people around her to better understand the human condition. She also greatly enjoys spending her time reading literature and philosophy and adventuring the outdoors as a way of fostering her curiosity. She hopes to use her abilities to create a more meaningful, intellectual, and selfless connection with the people and patients around her.

Alina Plavsky is an internal medicine resident at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, Oregon. She is originally from Lithuania, but moved to the United States at the age of 7. She received her undergraduate degree and Master of Public Health from Dartmouth, after which she moved back to the Pacific Northwest to attend medical school at the University of Washington. During her residency, she has focused her attention on addressing disparities in health quality, access, and cost in healthcare and aspires to be an excellent primary care physician. She also enjoys the outdoors, photography, Zumba, and travel.

Alida Rol practiced as an OBGYN physician for many years. She holds an MFA in

writing from Pacific University. Her poems and essays have won several awards and

have appeared in Rhino, Passager, The Examined Life, Nasty Women Poets Anthology,

and Hektoen International, among others. She lives in Eugene, Oregon.

Aya Sato is a final-year nursing student, public healthcare worker and writer currently based in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. After studying contemporary dance, a new love of science and education is challenging her to see healing and the human body through fresh intersections/lenses. Aya is looking for: ways to undermine the structural colonialism present in healthcare systems, time to write more poems, tools to connect people to their bodies and communities.

Brent Schnipke is a reader, writer, doctor and first year psychiatry resident in Dayton, OH. His professional interests include medical humanities, narrative medicine, and education. His personal interests include writing, exploring the outdoors, and spending time with his family. His essays and reviews have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and Relief Journal, as well as Student Doctor Network and in-Training, an online magazine for medical students.

Carol Scott-Conner, MD, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of Surgery at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine. She writes memoir in the form of fiction, exploring the world of women in surgery. Her stories have been published in multiple literary journals ranging from “The Healing Muse” through “North Dakota Quarterly,” and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. A collection of her short stories was published as “A Few Small Moments.” She is past editor-in-chief of “The Examined Life Journal: A Literary Journal of the Carver College of Medicine” and currently serves as its fiction editor. The present piece is homage to the night shift, when everything extraneous seems to fade away and only life and death remain.

Mandeep Singh is a medical student, rapper and saxophonist currently based at King's College London. Having experienced immeasurable (given existing methodologies, at least) health benefits from storytelling in rap and musical improvisation, he now seeks to understand how these benefits may work with, ambitions of implementing them in his practice as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist. He is inspired by Chekhov, Kendrick Lamar, Irvin Yalom and Andre 3000. His band, Passenger Casanova, will release their jazz fusion, hip-hop and progressive rock inspired EP in mid-June.

Sarah Sparks is a witchcraft poet, unstable patron, neurotic sex symbol, midnight writer, over-educated sadist, and generally only dangerous to herself and a few unfortunate bedmates. She can be found haunting the halls of academia, frequenting shady establishments or eating candy at home in bed when the mood takes her.

Andrew Taylor-Troutman earned a certificate in Narrative Healthcare from the Thomas Wolfe Center for Narrative through Lenoir-Rhyne University. His recent essays have been published online at Mockingbird (http://www.mbird.com) and his poetry at Bearings (https://collegevilleinstitute.org/bearings). He is a Presbyterian pastor serving a congregation in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He and his wife have three children.

Kathy Tran is a recent graduate of the University of Houston, where she received a B.S in Psychology and minors in Biology and Medicine & Society. She is particularly interested in the relationship between medicine and the arts, and is passionate about using storytelling as a tool for mental health advocacy. Kathy is currently working at a primary care clinic while she applies to medical school.

Eileen Valinoti BSN, M.A. is retired after a varied career in oncology, nursing education and school nursing. Her essays have appeared in the following journals: "Hospital Corners" in Pulse, "First Day on the Wards" in ARS MEDICA, "A Mysterious Illness" and "Accident" in The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine, "Medication Nurse" in Blood and Thunder, "Night Duty" in The Healing Muse, and "The Cancer Unit" in Confrontation. Several pieces were included in the following anthologies: "First Day on the Wards" in Body and Soul: Narratives of Healing from ARS MEDICA, "A Silent Woman" in Meditations on Hope and "Hospital Corners" in Pulse- Voices from the Heart of Medicine: Editors' Picks: A Third Anthology.

Ronald Walker has been exhibited in more than 200 group shows as well as forty solo exhibits. He works in a style he calls "Suburban Primitive" which combines his interest in life in the suburbs with the origins of art. He holds both an MA from Central Missouri State University and a MFA from the University of Kansas. His work, for the last several years, has been done in gouache on board. He lives with his wife, two children, two dogs and

Alice Wang is a third-year undergraduate student at Stanford University studying Materials

Science & Engineering. She is interested in the importance of interpersonal narratives in both art and medicine, and seeks to better understand the healing potential of narrative medicine. Alice enjoys portrait drawing and her artwork has been exhibited in student exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and the San Diego Museum of Art. She is involved in biomaterials research for regenerative medicine at Stanford and will be applying to medical school this summer.

Carolyn Welch worked for many years as a pediatric intensive care nurse and currently works as a family nurse practitioner. She has an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Carolyn’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Gulf Coast, Poet Lore, Sundog, Tar River Poetry, Conduit, Connecticut River Review, High Desert Journal, The Southeast Review, Zone 3, The Minnesota Review, American Journal of Nursing and other literary journals. Her poetry collection, The Garden of Fragile Being, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

Kelley Yuan will begin her studies at Sidney Kimmel Medical College in 2018 as part of the Penn State/SKMC combined BS/MD program. She studies illustration and fences épée when she should be revising for exams. Her work seeks to capture the rare, light-hearted moments in a field filled with pain, fear, and tough decisions.

Annie Zhu is a medical student at the University of Toronto (Class of 2020). She is passionate about sequential art and exploring narratives about medical topics and current issues in health. Her work can be found at cazdinal.carbonmade.com.