CUNY Academic Commons

Senior fellow, Center for Health, Media, & Policy; adjunct faculty, Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing

As a senior fellow at the Hunter College Center for Health, Media, & Policy, I co-founded Narrative Writing for Health Care Professionals, a program that offers writing workshops for professional development to hospital nurses, nurse educators, and others. As adjunct faculty in the School of Nursing, I teach reflective writing as a way to deepen student engagement in the writing process and strengthen academic, professional, and personal expressive writing. Academic interests include narrative medicine and medical humanities, the psychology of expressive writing (and its physical and mental health benefits, as demonstrated by James W. Pennebaker and others), and writing pedagogy (enhancing student learning and engagement through artistic strategies and the use of digital technology). I was a senior editor at the American Journal of Nursing, where I worked for nine years, and I currently freelance as a writer and editor for biomedical journals and private clients. Literature, music, and visual arts top a long list of informal aesthetic and intellectual interests; history, politics, domestic and foreign policy, economics, and theology top a long list of nagging preoccupations.