Poet, doctor at Harvard Medical School to serve as YCP’s writer-in-residence

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

            YORK, Pa. – Rafael Campo, poet and doctor of internal medicine at Harvard Medical School, is serving as this year’s York College of Pennsylvania Writer-in-Residence. He will present a poetry reading and discussion titled “The Healing Arts: Poetry and Medicine” at 7 p.m., April 2, in DeMeester Theater, Evelyn and Earle Wolf Hall. The event is open to the public free of charge.

            Campo teaches and practices general internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, where his medical practice serves mostly Latinos, gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered people, and people with HIV infection. His work with the Harvard Program in the Medical Humanities contributes to its mission of improving approaches to doctor-patient communication and cross-cultural medicine. The Program’s overriding aim is to affirm the indispensability of creative expression to the healing process, and to develop novel, constructive approaches to patient care and medical education that make use of the tremendous power of the human spirit in the face of illness.

            Campo’s poetry and essays are widely acclaimed. His most recent works include a collection of essays on poetry and healing, “The Healing Art: A Doctor's Black Bag of Poetry” (2003) and his fifth book of poems, “The Enemy” (2007). Campo is also the author of “Landscape with Human Figure” (2002), which won the Gold Medal in poetry from ForeWord; “The Other Man Was Me” (1994), which won the 1993 National Poetry Series Award; “What the Body Told” (1996), which won a Lambda Literary Award for Poetry; and “The Poetry of Healing: A Doctor's Education in Empathy, Identity, and Desire” (1997), a collection of essays which also won a Lambda Literary Award for memoir.

            Campo’s poetry and prose have appeared in many major anthologies, including Best American Poetry 1995, Things Shaped in Passing: More "Poets for Life" Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (1996), Currents in the Dancing River: Contemporary Latino Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry (1994), and Gay Men at the Millennium (1997). His work has also appeared in numerous prominent periodicals, including JAMA, the Kenyon Review, The Lancet, The Nation, The New England Journal of Medicine, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Out, the Paris Review, and The Progressive.             Campo’s work has also been featured on the National Endowment for the Arts website and on National Public Radio. A graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Medical School, he is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and of the Annual Achievement Award from the National Hispanic Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has served as visiting writer at Amherst College, George A. Miller Endowment Visiting Scholar at the University of Illinois, Champagne-Urbana, and Fanny Hurst Visiting Poet at Brandeis University. He is also the recipient of an Honorary Doctor of Literature degree from Amherst College.

            Located in southcentral Pennsylvania, York College offers more than 50 baccalaureate majors in professional programs, the sciences and humanities to its 4,600 undergraduate students. With a 15:1 student-to-faculty ratio and distinctive mentoring programs, York provides an environment that emphasizes close personal attention to students from 32 states and 30 countries.

 

# # #