BU Creative Writing

We are very proud to announce that Rafael Campo (Poetry 1991), a professor at Harvard Medical School, Beth Israel Deaconess, and Lesley University, has won the Hippocrates Open International Prize for Poetry and Medicine. The prize has been awarded in the United Kingdom since 2009 and has quickly become one of the most important international prizes for poetry, as well as a unique place for poetry and medicine to meet.

On his first prize winning poem, Campo says, “‘Morbidity and mortality rounds’ was conceived some years ago, after I visited a patient of mine in the hospital who was dying of hepatocellular carcinoma and awaiting transfer to a hospice facility.  To my astonishment, he asked my forgiveness for not responding to the treatment, and for causing me so much trouble.  I have long been haunted by the irony of his words, as I had felt so acutely throughout the course of his illness the limitations of the biomedical model and my own personal helplessness, and thus held myself responsible for his death, but didn’t know how I could express my own wish to be forgiven.

“…My head spun with all my conflicting feelings, which finally took shape in the poem’s repetitions, and also became reflected in the poem’s title; though in the end I didn’t attend the M&M conference, I felt that through the poem I was able to address what for me were the most important lessons he taught me, especially the power of empathy to combat the distancing we almost reflexively adopt toward our patients, and the necessity of confronting our own shortcomings.”

Rafael Campo (Poetry 1991), M.A., M.D., D. Litt.(Hon.), is a poet and essayist who teaches and practices general 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 many honors and awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Poetry Series award, and a Lambda Literary Award for his poetry.  His most recent book, The Enemy (Duke University Press, 2007), won the Sheila Motton Book Award from the New England Poetry Club, one of America’s oldest poetry organizations.

Congratulations, Rafael!

Photo ©Hippocrates Prize

Mark your calendars for an evening of art and poetry at the Gallery Benoit, this Friday, May 17! Three of our current students, Sara Rivera, Sarah Huener, and Patrick Connolly (all Poetry 2013) will read their work alongside artist Craig Stockwell’s minimalism and not.

What: GALLERY BENOIT PRESENTS Art and Poetry at Gallery Benoit
When: Thursday May 16, 7-8 pm
Where: Gallery Benoit, 4 Clarendon Street, Boston, MA 02116
info@gallerybenoit.com
(617) 309-7902

Sara Rivera is a writer and artist from Albuquerque, New Mexico and an MFA candidate in Poetry at Boston University. She is active in the visual arts, theater, and music and currently works as an intern at Gallery Benoit.

Sarah Huener is a poet and musician from North Carolina. She is in the MFA program at Boston University, and reads for AGNI. She plays with the Harvard Baroque Chamber Orchestra here in Boston. Sarah likes whiskey, bass lines, and line breaks.

Patrick Connolly is in the poetry MFA program at Boston University. He is from Medford, Mass. He likes basketball and gardening.

We’re excited to announce the publication of 1996 (House of Anansi Press, 2013) by Sara Peters (Poetry 2008). Her publisher describes the collection as “a book about obsessions — about desire, violence, sex, beauty, and cruelty, about how they lace through our days, leaving us changed.” Robert Pinsky has called the book “deeper than mere darkness.”

Sara Peters was born in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. She completed her MFA at Boston University in 2008, and was a Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University from 2010 to 2012. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Daily, The Threepenny Review, and The Walrus. She lives in Toronto.

Please visit the site below to read a brave piece by Tara Skurtu (Poetry 2013), about her experience being near the finish line at the Boston Marathon this year.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tara-skurtu/after-the-marathon-bombin_b_3189644.html?utm_hp_ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false#sb=4854126,b=facebook

Tara also has two new poems up at B O D Y, an international online magazine based in Prague. She is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and her poems appear in Poetry Review, Hanging Loose, Salamander, Poet Lore, The Los Angeles Review, Hiram Poetry Review, The Southeast Review, The Comstock Review, and elsewhere.

Lloyd Schwartz, a poet and professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and a a regular commentator for NPR’s “Fresh Air,” has just named six of his favorite new poets. We are proud to report that one of the six is our own Tara Skurtu, who is currently studying with Robert Pinsky and Louise Glück in BU’s MFA in Poetry program. Tara will travel as a Robert Pinsky Global Fellow to Romania this fall and will graduate from BU in January 2014.

You can read the story and one of Tara’s poems (that originally appeared in Salamander) here:

http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2013/04/24/favorite-new-poets

She also has two new poems (“Biter” and “Foreclosure”–written while in the program) up at B O D Y, an international online magazine based in Prague.

http://bodyliterature.com/2013/04/22/tara-skurtu/?t=Tara+Skurtu

Tara Skurtu is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her poems appear in Poetry Review, Hanging Loose, Salamander, Poet Lore, The Los Angeles Review, Hiram Poetry Review, The Southeast Review, The Comstock Review, and elsewhere.

Congratulations, Tara!