I have devoted myself to the practice of poetry for the past several years after leaving a career as a developmental pediatrician and medical and family psychotherapist and psychopharmacologist. I retired from medicine almost ten years ago at age 42 due to a brain injury caused by improper medical treatment. After the injury, thinking, speaking, reading, and writing were often difficult for several years (and periodically now) due to attention and word finding problems, and occasional bouts of temporal lobe seizures. I needed to learn to express, in language, what it seemed I did not have language to express. As I had done earlier in my life, I naturally turned to poetry, my first love.

       I first stated writing poetry as a child and continued writing throughout my life as a primarily private way of expressing difficult emotion and personal struggle- a coping strategy. When the very act of communication with self and other - always something easy for me - became a disability - the struggle to read, understand, and make sense through the making of poems became more than a means of coping. It became a primary means of communication. Somehow, sitting at the keyboard, I could hold onto words and images came more easily than linear thoughts - while sentences didn't march off the cliff of my mind like so many lemmings! Poetry has not been just an integral part of my neurological and spiritual healing, poetry has been the healing itself. In the process, I've developed a desire to share my work with as borad an audience as will have it.

        Last Spring I received my M.A. in English / Creative Writing with Honors from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut where I studied poetry with Hugh Ogden and Elizabeth Libbey. My thesis, a collection of poetry, won the Paul Smith Distinguished Master's Thesis Award. Over the past two years, I have also been fortunate enough to work with Mark Doty, Andrew Hudgins, and Robert Phillips. While an undergraduate, I worked for a semester writing poetry with John Frederick Nims.

       I earned a B.A. summa cum laude in Social Sciences from Harvard and an M.D. from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. Pediatric Residency, Fellowship, and the first years of practice were in the South Bronx and East Harlem. My medical work was as a clinician, clinical researcher, writer, teacher, and patient advocate in private practice. In my practice, I integrated skills as a physician trained in pediatrics with other training I had received both before during and after medical school as an individual, marital and family therapist, clinical hypnotherapist, and psychopharmacologist, and meditation practitioner. My goal was to practice mediation within the mainstream integrating biological, psychological, social, and spiritual factors. I always saw great similarity between the art and cart of poetry and the approach to a particular patient and family and the mutual crafting of a healing process.

       Over time, my practice specialized in the area of children and adults with developmental and learning disabilities, especially attentional dysfunction - such as I now have! My work, and that of my colleagues has been scientifically documented in articles and a book which was published shortly after my retirement. For the past twenty years, I have lived in Hartford, not far from where I grew up.

       My neurological condition is somewhat unstable and I am regularly forced to take breaks from reading and writing. Poetry is both an enabling process and motivation for my return from these periods of sudden disability. My work has appeared in Heartbeat of New England: An Anthology of Contemporary Nature Poem The Licking River Review, Half Tones To Jubilee, The Louisville Review, ELM, Gulf Stream Magazine and Mangrove, and The Texas Review. My first book of poems The Won Back Heart is out there looking for a publisher.

       My poetry is infused with the richness of my childhood, my medical background, my own struggles with illness and disability, and my love nature and life and its ironies.