Date/Time
Date(s) - Tuesday, April 19, 2016
6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
Location
Williamson County Public Library
Category(ies)
Come join us to hear the “poets who heal” as they read from their works This program is part of the Vanderbilt University Lectures in the Library series.
Brenda Butka practices pulmonary medicine at Vanderbilt. She has been writing poetry since childhood and has been published in The Threepenny Review, Slant, The Florida Review, The Cortland Review, Cleaver, JAMA, Chest, and other journals. She thinks poetry should identify the heroic in the everyday, and the everyday in the heroic.
Bruce Jennings is on the faculty of Vanderbilt and Yale and has written for many years on ethics and health care. He is currently thinking about human dignity and care in the context of Alzheimer’s disease and is working on a new book to be called “Dementia and the Human Good.” In his poems he is exploring what he calls the “memorial personhood” of his father, who died of Alzheimer’s in 1991.
Doug Hester is an anesthesiologist who uses poetry partly to process the stresses of his job. Currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts at Murray State University, he has published poetry, fiction and essays in both medical and non-medical journals.
Julie Sumner worked as a Vanderbilt nurse for twelve years, in the intensive care units and also on the liver transplant service. In 2009 she began a private massage practice, and continues to volunteer at Siloam family Health Center. Her poetry has been published in The Behemoth, Catapult, and the Vanderbilt Medical Center publication House Organ. She has published a chapbook, Flight Path, is a poetry editor and a member of the Humanities in Medicine Working Group at Vanderbilt.
All library programs are free and open to the public. Call 616-695-1243 x1 for more information about this program and other services.
