Join us virtually for an afternoon of poetry and discussion about the human experience of medicine, featuring poets from our San Francisco community. Farah Hamade, inaugural UCSF Library Artist in Residence, will take visual notes during the event that will culminate in a visual piece that represents the event/experience.

Schedule:

• 12:00pm: Welcome!
• 12:15pm: Poetry readings from Sharon Pretti, Kathleen McClung, and Peggy Tahir
• 12:45pm: Discussion and reflection
• 12:55pm Closing
• 1:00pm: Bonus post-event discussion time

Registration is open to all! Register below for the Zoom link.

About the Poets and Speakers:

• Sharon Pretti’s poetry has appeared in numerous journals including Spillway, Calyx, JAMA, Bellevue Literary Review and the Schuylkill Valley Journal. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is also an award-winning haiku poet and a frequent contributor to haiku journals including Modern Haiku and Frogpond. She works as a medical social worker at Laguna Honda Hospital. She has led a poetry group for the patients at Laguna Honda since 1996 and has edited and produced a yearly anthology of patient poems. For many years, she also taught poetry workshops for seniors in assisted living facilities. She lives in San Francisco with her husband.
• Kathleen McClung is the author of four books of poetry. Her most recent collection, A Juror Must Fold in on Herself, won the 2020 Rattle Chapbook Prize. Her work appears in a variety of journals and anthologies including Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California, Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace, and Fog and Light: San Francisco Through the Eyes of the Poets Who Live Here. In 2018-2019 she was a writer-in-residence at Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. Kathleen teaches at Skyline College in San Bruno and serves as Guest Editor for The MacGuffin literary journal and as Associate Director for the Soul-Making Keats literary contest. She has lived in San Francisco for over 30 years.
• Peggy Tahir is a poet and research librarian at the UCSF Library. She received her MA in English: Creative Writing from SFSU and has been published in small press poetry journals. She has worked in several capacities at the UCSF Library since 1998. She currently works as Research and Copyright Librarian and serves as liaison to the School of Dentistry and to two joint programs between the UCSF School of Medicine and UC Hastings College of the Law. Before coming to UCSF, she developed digital library collections for The Healthcare Forum, and was Manager of Libraries at California Pacific Medical Center and the University of the Pacific School of Dentistry. 
• Michelle-Linh (Michelle) Nguyen is a primary care doctor and researcher at UCSF and the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. She is also a lifelong writer and supporter of the arts. Her work focuses on cultivating patient- and community-centered care through interdisciplinary scholarship in science and the humanities.

• Farah Hamade is a biomedical illustrator and animator based in Oakland, California. She previously completed a Masters in Biomedical Communications at the University of Toronto, and is currently the UCSF Library Artist in Residence, and also works in surgical VR. She draws upon her interdisciplinary background in scientific research and the creative arts to visualize complex topics, explore ways to make the sciences more accessible, and tell healthcare stories.

Artwork by Farah Hamade.