I was born in 1941, the year of Pearl Harbor. My father, a newly minted physician, did not have to go to war and built a large general medical practice in New York City. Although rarely home, he was a distant but powerful force in my childhood. I wrote in high school, but my interest in poetry did not blossom until 1989, when I joined the faculty at the Stony Brook University Medical Center, a school in the vanguard of the "back-to-literature" movement in medical education. I am currently on the editorial board of Xanadu, the literary journal of the Long Island Poetry Collective, and I run its weekly workshop. I have won the 2003 poetry prize of the American College of Physicians and the 2005 poetry prize of the Institute for Medicine in Contemporary Society.
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