Luisa Caycedo-Kimura is a current MFA candidate in poetry. As a Robert Pinsky Global Fellow she will travel to Spain in the fall. Luisa was born in Colombia and grew up in New York City. A former attorney, she left the legal profession to pursue her passion for writing. Luisa has received awards for her poetry and was nominated for the 2012 Pushcart Prize. Her poems appear in various publications, including Connecticut Review, Louisiana Literature, PALABRA, San Pedro River Review, and Sunken Garden Poetry 1992-2011. Her poems have also been included in the writing curricula at colleges and universities.

Congratulations, Luisa!

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

Great news! Three of our poetry alumni have been published in the spring issue of Redivider. Lisa Hiton, Daniel Kraines (both Poetry 2011), and Megan Fernandes (Poetry 2012) all have poems appearing in Redivider 10.2, which is available for purchase here.

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.

This month’s Poets & Writers also features an article by Daphne titled “The Calm Before the Calm: Silence and the Creative Writer.” You can find the article, in which she praises quietude even after publication, in the May/June issue on newsstands now.

For those in the Boston area, Daphne will be giving two readings later this month: May 28 at Harvard Bookstore, and May 29 at Newtonville Books.

Daphne Kalotay (Fiction 1994) is the author of the novel Russian Winter, which won the Writers’ League of Texas Fiction Award and has been published in twenty languages, and the fiction collection Calamity and Other Stories, which was short-listed for the Story Prize. A MacDowell fellow, Daphne holds a PhD in modern and contemporary literature and an MA in creative writing, both from Boston University, and has received fellowships from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, Yaddo, and the Bogliasco Foundation. She has taught literature and creative writing at Boston University, Skidmore College, Middlebury College, and Grub Street. Copresident of the Boston chapter of the Women’s National Book Association, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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.

Kelly Morse graduated from our MFA program in poetry in 2012. Her work has appeared in Side B Magazine, PoetsArtists, Conversations Across Borders and elsewhere. Currently, she is working on a series of poems that explores linguistic and world-view gaps between Eastern and Western cultures.

Congratulations, Kelly!

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.

Patricia Park (Fiction 2009) teaches writing at Boston University and is at work on a modern day rewrite of Jane Eyre, which explores themes of home, otherness and identity. She lives in New York City and Boston and blogs at koreanbodega.com. Follow her on Twitter: @patriciapark718

Congratulations, Patricia!

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!