UCI School of Medicine Program in Medical Ethics, UCI Interdisciplinary Center for the Scientific Study of Ethics and Morality, and UC Humanities Research Institute present:

"Cultural Competence: Poetry and the Importance of Voice in the Illness Experiment"
with Rafael Campo, Harvard Medical School
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston
Lesley University

Tuesday, January 19, 2010
5:00 p.m.
Humanities Instructional Building (HIB) 135

The earliest of civilizations, from many Native American cultures to the ancient Greeks, recognized an inextricable interrelationship between poetry and healing.  This lecture will investigate the link between creative self-expression and healing, and will contract a "biocultural" narrative of illness with the restrictive biomedical apparatus encountered in American healthcare today. 

About the speaker:
Rafael Campo, M.A., M.D., D. Litt, is a poet and essayist who teaches and practices 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 numerous honors and awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Poetry Series award, and a Lambda Literary Award for his poetry.  His third collection of poetry, Diva, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and his most recent, The Enemy, won the Sheila Motton Book Award from the New England Poetry Club, one of the nation's oldest poetry organizations.  His work has been selected for inclusion in the Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies, and has appeared in numerous prominent periodicals including The Nation, The New Republic, the New York Times Magazine, Paris Review, Salon.com, Slate.com, and the Washington Post Book World. 

For further information, please contact Sandy Cushman, 949-824-3344 or scushman@uci.edu.