BU Creative Writing

Congratulations to Tara Skurtu, who has continued her publishing blitz with three more poems!

Two of her poems (“Catechism” and “Skurtu, Romania”) have been published in the 20th anniversary issue (Part 2) of Salamander. And “Kazoo” is in the newly released issue of The Dalhousie Review.

Tara has also recently been awarded the BU Class of 2013 Academy of American Poets Prize. The contest judge was Gail Mazur; one poet in the current poetry class was selected.

Tara Skurtu (Poetry 2013)’s 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. Earlier this year she was named one of Lloyd Schwartz (“Fresh Air”)’s six favorite new poets.

Wonderful news for Renee Emerson (Poetry 2009): her first full-length poetry collection, Keeping Me Still, is forthcoming from Winter Goose Publishing in March 2014. Congratulations, Renee!

Her publisher writes that she is "an intensely moving writer whose work is not only immersed in human emotion, but also draws power from hope found in the midst of a fallen and broken world." Become a fan of Renee's work on Facebook here.

Renee Emerson's poetry has been published in 32 Poems, Christianity and Literature, Indiana Review, Literary Mama, Southern Humanities Review, storySouth, and elsewhere (links are to her poems online). Renee teaches creative writing and composition at Shorter University in Rome, Georgia, where she lives with her husband and daughter. She is currently great with child.

We are proud to report that Eleanor Goodman (Poetry 2003) has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to spend this coming year in Beijing as a Visiting Scholar at Beijing University. The grant will support her newest book-length translation of Chinese poetry.

Eleanor Goodman is a writer and a translator from Chinese. Her work appears in journals such as PN Review, Chutzpah 天南, Pleiades, Cha, and The Best American Poetry website. She is a Research Associate at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. She has held writing residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the American Academy in Rome. Her book of translations, The Selected Poems of Wang Xiaoni, is forthcoming from Zephyr Press.

Congratulations, Eleanor!

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