A. Scott Pearson is an associate professor of surgery at Vanderbilt University. As a member of Vanderbilt’s Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society, he is interested in how the patient’s narrative forms the foundation of the doctor-patient relationship. Dr. Pearson is involved in education across the university and teaches an undergraduate course on narrative medicine within the College of Arts and Science. He is author of the novels, Rupture and Public Anatomy.

Nancy Yang is a second year medical student at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. She's been painting and drawing for as long as she can remember, and it's still the best way she knows how to express herself. In human anatomy, she often sees architectural structures that exhibit the simultaneous strength and fragility of the body, and the depth of what it holds. 

Philip Berry is a consultant hepatologist working in London, UK. Outside his specialty, he writes regularly on medical ethics, patient-physician relationships and the psychology of medical decision-making. His blog 'Illusions of Autonomy' has been running for 3 years and has attracted over 50,000 readers. Dr. Berry also writes mainstream and speculative fiction. His writing activities can be explored at www.philberrycreative.wordpress.com and on Twitter @philaberry.

Cristin Millett is an artist whose investigations of medicine and its history are integral to her artistic process. Her research stems from her childhood growing up in a medical household where discussions, most often at the dinner table, focused on the human body: its diseases, symptoms, diagnosis, and treatments. Millett is an Associate Professor of Art and an Embedded Faculty Researcher in the Arts and Design Research Incubator at The Pennsylvania State University. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, including at the Villa Strozzi in Florence, the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago, the Exploratorium in San Francisco, and the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia. Learn more about the artist at www.cristin-millett.com

Jonathan Katz is a medical student at the University of Miami. He is particularly interested in web-development, literature, and data science. See more of his work on JonathanKatz.me

Bradeigh Godfrey is an Assistant Professor in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at the University of Utah. She divides her time between clinical practice, research, and teaching. She also enjoys creative writing, and this is her first publication of short fiction. 

Carly Bergey is a speech-language pathologist, singer and writer working primarily with people experiencing voice problems. She has helped to pioneer multidisciplinary voice clinics alongside stellar Ear, Nose and Throat physicians at National Jewish Health in Denver.

Dennis Svoronos is a Boston-based sculptor whose body of work has surrounded his diagnosis of terminal brain cancer in 2009. His sculpture explores the conundrums of living life when faced with a difficult diagnosis. Seven years after his brain cancer diagnosis, he continues to work. Through his kinetic and interactive sculptural works, Svoronos ponders the problems he and others face as life-long patients, conveying both the horror and humor of the place between chronically ill and unexpectedly well. His latest work encompasses thousands of replicated medications, as well as eerie gadgets and animatronics. As a patient himself, Svoronos uses his work to create a safe space to discuss and debate issues affecting the most vulnerable. ‘Grey Matters’ a solo show examining the ethics of treatment is at the Boston Sculptors Gallery from October 12-November 13, 2016.

Blake Gregory, M.D. is a primary care physician and the Associate Medical Director the Adult Medicine Clinic at Highland General Hospital in Oakland, California. Gregory, who is a core faculty member for the Internal Medicine residency training program at Highland, works closely with residents in both the inpatient and outpatient setting. She has dedicated her career to serving vulnerable populations, from her time as Chief Resident at San Francisco General Hospital to her current position with the county hospital in Oakland and believes in the power of writing to process the joys and hardships of practicing medicine. 

Melissa Rosato lives in her hometown of Philadelphia with her son Benjamin. By day, she is a mild-mannered family physician providing primary care to adults and children. By night, she is a writer. She writes non-fiction, fiction, and poetry, and once even published a poem a long time ago. She is very grateful that Intima will be home for her first essay publication. Writing, and spending time with writers, are the times when she feels most at home – except, of course, when she is actually at home. 

Ally Shwed is a cartoonist and writer, originally from New Jersey. She received her Master of Fine Arts degree in Sequential Art from the Savannah College of Art & Design and has worked with BOOM! Studios, Image Comics, and IDW Publishing. Currently, Shwed is a professor of sequential art, scriptwriting, and art direction at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Querétaro, Mexico, and is co-founder of Little Red Bird Media, a visual arts studio specializing in alternative comics and graphic design. Upcoming projects include an art book of daily sketches of cats, called Cats on Cats on Cats; she is also editing Blocked, a comic anthology about online dating experiences, due out Summer 2017.  See more work at allyshwed.com

Daniel James Waters, DO is a cardiothoracic surgeon practicing in Iowa. He earned a Graduate Certificate in Narrative Medicine from Lenoir-Rhyne University(Asheville, NC) in May 2016 and is a Candidate in the Master of Arts in Writing Program at the Thomas Wolfe Center for Narrative, also at LRU. First published as a medical student in 1980, Dr. Waters has published a number of short stories and essays including three JAMA “A Piece of My Mind” selections, two of which were chosen for JAMA’s two hardback “Best Of” anthologies.  He completed his Cardiac Surgery training at The Cleveland Clinic Foundation in 1989 and has practiced at Mercy Medical Center – North Iowa for over 25 years. He and his wife Pamela reside in Clear Lake, Iowa.

Taylor McMahon, a recent graduate of Emerson College majored in Communication Disorders and minored in Health Communications. Her interests in storytelling and community engagement intersect with her passions as an actor and dancer.

Angela Cooke Jackson, an Associate Professor at Emerson College in Boston, is a health communication and behavioral science specialist. She uses a interdisciplinary approach to investigate the intersections of health literacy, behavior changes and social media among high-risk youth and women of color.

Dana Mendes, a first-year student at Assumption College, is pursuing Secondary Education and Visual Arts.  She is also a member of Assumption’s field hockey team. After her lengthy hospitalization and bone marrow transplant from her sister Bianca, she was given a clean bill of health in Summer 2016.

Jennifer Tsai is a third year medical student at Alpert Medical School. She graduated from Brown University with a double concentration in Ethnic Studies and Health & Human Biology. She is always excited to explore and practice Narrative Medicine, and is currently a student in the Medical Humanities Scholarly Concentration with a particular interest in the intersections of race, medicine, and society. Tsai is involved in health disparities and healthcare for the underserved curricula as well as diversity and inclusion measures at AMS.

Andrew Taylor-Troutman is a writer whose most recent book is a novel titled Earning Innocence in homage to a line from Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. Taylor-Troutman holds Masters Degrees from Union Presbyterian Seminary and the University of Virginia Charlottesville, and also serves as pastor of New Dublin Presbyterian Church, a congregation founded in 1769 in the mountains of southwestern Virginia.

Lilly Taing is a recent graduate from the University of Southern California and is currently a Fulbright grantee in Sweden exploring the effects of estrogen on the neurobiological regulation of food reward behavior. Taing hopes to eventually become a physician, working with the community to address health and health disparities through social activism, art narrative and research.

Jodi Paik lives with her husband, two children, and two cats in a small town on the California coast, just a few miles south of the famous Mavericks surf break. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in various journals. She holds an MFA in Writing from Columbia University, and is currently at work on a memoir. 

John C. Mannone is a writer who has published in the New England Journal ofMedicine, Inscape Literary Journal, Acentos Review, Windhover, Artemis, Still, TownCreek Poetry, Poetica Magazine, Arc-24, Artemis, Drunk Monkeys, Raven Chronicles,Pedestal and Baltimore Review. He has been awarded a 2016 Weymouth writing residency and has two literary poetry collections, including one on disability, DisabledMonsters (The Linnet’s Wings Press, December 2015) to be featured in Nashville’s 2016Southern Festival of Books. A three-time Pushcart nominee, Mannone won numerous awards, such as the 2015 Joy Margrave award for creative nonfiction and the 2015 Tennessee Mountain Writers Award in poetry. He edits poetry for Silver Blade and Abyss & Apex and is a college professor of physics in east Tennessee. For more about his work, visit http://jcmannone.wordpress.com.

Talia Malekan is currently a sophomore at Barnard College of Columbia University. Her passion for creation an interest in the humanitarian aspect of practicing medicine inspires her work.

Kaja Weeks is a clinic-based Developmental Music Educator with training in early intervention (Floortime/DIR) and a classically-trained singer who has designed the approach, The Relational Voice, to use with children on the autism spectrum.  She is a graduate of the 3-year program, New Directions for Writing of the Washington Center for Psychoanalysis (Washington, DC).  Her creative writing has been published in The Potomac Review (nominee, Pushcart Prize), The New Directions Journal, Fickle Muses: Journal of Mythic Poetry and Fiction and forthcoming in Ars Medica: A Journal of Medicine, The Arts and Humanities. Her scholarly works appear in journals and presentations in the United States and Canada.

Kirsty Whitmore is a second-year medical student at Griffith University on the Gold Coast. Prior to pursuing a career in medicine, she trained as an intensive care nurse and paramedic. She seeks to explore and better understand the patient and clinician experience through story and narrative. Whitmore, who is interested in the role of reflective writing in the personal and professional development of future clinicians, was the joint winner of the Balint Society of Australia and New Zealand Student Reflective Writing Prize in 2016.

Laurel Friedman Aytes received her PhD from the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego in 2016. Her scholarly research interrogates concepts of disease, illness and disability as social formations as much as biological fact. Her dissertation analyzes the ways global tuberculosis control frameworks support rigid interpretations of health and illness that enshrine individual, curative treatment as the singular weapon in confronting the pandemic. She brings together ethnographic observation of local public health practices in Southern California with research on global tuberculosis control efforts to provide a multidimensional analysis of tuberculosis as a global pandemic with diverse regional effects.

Karen Dukess has been a tour guide in the former Soviet Union, a newspaper reporter at the St. Petersburg Times in Florida, and the founding features editor of The Moscow Times in Russia. She has written book reviews for USAToday and blogged about raising teen-aged boys at theblunderyears.com and the Huffington Post. She has performed her writing at Writers Read in Chelsea and is a member of the Terzo Piano writer's group. She is a speechwriter at the UN Development Programme and lives in Pelham, New York.

Paul Perilli is a writer whose work has appeared in bioStories, The Transnational, Hektoen International, The Satirist and Coldnoon, and is forthcoming in Litro. 

Nashwa Khan is writer in Toronto, whose work has been published in Vice, Rewire, This Magazine, JStor Daily, and The New York Times. She is a graduate associate with the York Centre for Asian Research and The Tubman Institute and is enrolled in the Masters of Environmental Studies at York University with areas of concentration focused on narrative medicine, community and public health, as well as refugee and forced migration studies. Khan is an avid storyteller and a lover of medical humanities and public health education. Her Twitter handle is @nashwakay

Woods Nash teaches in the Honors College at the University of Houston for the program in Medicine and Society. He’s also affiliated with UT’s McGovern Center for Humanities and Ethics and teaches in the McGovern Medical School. He’s published articles on Walker Percy, Cormac McCarthy, and David Foster Wallace. His poems, while mostly failing to appear, have been seen in JAMA, Annals of Internal Medicine, and the Journal of Medical Humanities. But none of that would tell you anything about his affections for soccer, Kentucky bourbon, and Nick Drake.

Paul Rousseau is a hospice and palliative medicine physician/writer in Charleston, South Carolina. He has been writing for over thirty years, in part to tell the untold stories of patients, in part to assuage the sorrow of the loss of his wife. His writing has appeared in Annals of Internal Medicine, JAMA, Journal of Palliative Medicine, Blood and Thunder, The Healing Muse, and other medical and literary journals, but he believes that "putting words to paper," whether published or not, is the most important part of his writing.

Ellen Sazzman has recently been published in Moment, Comstock Review, Beltway Quarterly, Common Ground, CALYX, and Poetica, among others.  She was a winner of the 2016 Moving Words Poetry Competition and a finalist in the 2010 Split This Rock poetry contest.  Sazzman, who is is a mother, grandmother, and retired lawyer living in Maryland, received Northern Virginia Review’s 2012 outstanding poetry award, a Pushcart nomination from Bloodroot Literary Magazine, and honorable mentions in the Anna Rosenberg poetry contest.

Kelly Goss is a second-year master's student in the General Psychology program at New York University who will graduate May 2017. She also earned her B.A. in Global Liberal Studies at NYU. Kelly’s passion for individual’s narratives of life experiences began as a high school journalist and creative writer. As an undergraduate, she became fascinated with Carl Jung’s archetypes and process of active imagination, which led her to pursue a career in Clinical Psychology. As a graduate student, she is interested in research centered on narratives of trauma and illness, parent and child relationships, family dynamics and multi-cultural issues.

Sarah Safford is a lyricist and an educator, recently retired from NYC Department of Education.  She has a Masters in Public Health and is an alumnus of the BMI Musical Theater Workshop.  Throughout her career she has created performances, songs, and most recently poetry, with health-related themes.

Joan Michelson is a writer whose publications include Toward the Heliopause, Poetic Matrix Publishers, CA, 2011, writing in British Council and Arts Council England anthologies of New Writing.  The poem, ‘Prognosis’, The American Journal of Nursing, 2012: ‘The Next Week’, The Best of Bellevue, Tenth Anniversary anthology. ‘Muslim Girl’ won the Hamish Canham Prize from the Poetry Society of England, 2012; ‘Daxon Fraser’, won first prize, Torriano International Competition, 2014. ‘Stories,’ won first prize, the Bristol Poetry Competition, 2015.  ‘Bloomvale Home’, poems about an Assistant Living Home, published by Original Books, UK, 2016. It credits ‘Intima’ for first publication of ‘Eva Borrisov’. Former Head of Creative Writing, University of Woverhampton, Joan teaches creative writing to Medical Students at Kings College, University of London. An American, she lives in England.

Rod Tanchanco is an internist and a Principal Investigator at PRA Health Sciences, working on early phase clinical trials. His interest predominantly revolves around little-known personal stories behind significant events in the history of medicine. His work has been published in Time.com, The Atlantic, The History News Network, Medical Economics, and Intima. He blogs at rodtanchanco.wordpress.com. 

Sara O’Donnell Adler is a rabbi and works as a hospital chaplain at The University of Michigan Health System.  Her poetry has appeared in Poetica Magazine, The Bear River Review, The Journal of Jewish Spiritual Care and is forthcoming in The Broadkill Review.  She lives with her family in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Ting Gou is a fourth-year medical student at the University of Michigan Medical School, interested in psychiatry and the relationship between memory and identity.  Her first chapbook, The Other House, was selected for the Delphi Poetry Series at Blue Lyra Press and was published in 2016.  Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart three times and appear in the Bellevue Literary Review, Best of the Net 2014, decomP, Ghost Ocean Magazine, Midwestern Gothic, r.kv.r.y., Superstition Review, and Word Riot.  Her poems also appear in JAMA, Chest, Anesthesiology, Medical Humanities, and elsewhere.  She is a poetry reader for The Examined Life, a literary magazine published by The University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine. 

Anne Vinsel is a residency program troubleshooter/surgical photographer at the University of Utah School of Medicine. She received first place in poetry in the Utah Original Writing Competition, and her writing has been published in Glimmer Train, COG, Pulse, Rubor, and 15 Bytes. A prose piece was one of three finalists in a text-to-(claymation) film competition judged by Lemony Snicket, and she has photographed a book on breast cancer surgery and reconstruction. Her interests include playing the violin, painting, working on a novel about the medical advantages of aging, and playing with her pit bull, Dr. Jackson.

Eugenia Amor is a third-year student of Medicine Degree at Valladolid University (Spain).  Amor believes in the importance of arts to create something original while connecting them with medical topics. Amor took part in the Project "Equipo MNCARS" at Reina Sofía Museum (Madrid) and during the immerses herself in literature and theater.

Megan Striplin holds a Bachelor of Science in Microbiology from the University of Washington and a Masters Degree in Public Health from the Heilbrunn Department of Population & Family Health at Columbia University. Her research interests include infectious disease and global child health in the context of health systems strengthening and social justice. 

Marina Catallozzi, MD, MSCE, is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Columbia University Medical Center.  Dr. Catallozzi is board certified in both Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. Dr. Catallozzi is the Director of Pediatric Medical Education and the College of Physicians and Surgeons, co-leader of the Sexuality, Sexual and Reproductive Health Certificate and the Director of the General Public Health Program at the Mailman School of Public Health.  Dr. Catallozzi has extensive expertise in the field of qualitative research, currently teaching qualitative research methodology at Mailman. Her current research interests include relationship choices of adolescent females, adolescent relationship violence, and clinical preventive services for adolescents.  Dr. Catallozzi uses a strengths-based approach to adolescent patient care, programming and research. 

Tim Cunningham is an assistant professor with a joint appointment at the schools of Nursing and Theatre at the University of Virginia.  He is a pediatric emergency nurse and clown who performs with the organization Clowns Without Borders.

Kerry Leddy Malawista is a writer and training psychoanalyst in Potomac, MD and co-chair of New Directions in Writing. She is permanent faculty at the Contemporary Freudian Society and has taught at George Washington University Psychology Doctoral Program, VCU and Smith College School of Social Work. Her personal essays have appeared in newspapers, magazines and literary journals including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Zone 3, Washingtonian Magazine, and The Account Magazine. She is the co-author of “Wearing my Tutu to Analysis and Other Stories” (2011, Columbia University Press), co-author of Who’s Behind the Couch (Karnac Books, 2017) and editor and author, The Therapist in Mourning: From the Faraway Nearby (2013, CUP) and other scholarly chapters and articles. She is a contributor to The Huffington Post.

Janice M. Anderson, MD, is the Associate Director for Forbes Family Medicine Residency Program, where she has coordinated the obstetric and gynecology curriculum for 25 years. She is also the Medical Director of a freestanding birth center, the Midwife Center for Birth and Women's Health, located in downtown Pittsburgh. In addition, she tends to the medical needs of incarcerated pregnant women at the Allegheny County Jail. In 2013, she earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Chatham University where her focus was on emotional trauma. She has also written How to Move in One Direction While Flying in Another, published in Hippocampus Magazine and nominated for Pushcart Prize: http://www.hippocampusmagazine.com/2012/11/how-to-move-in-one-direction-while-flying-in-another-by-janice-anderson/#disqus_thread.