Winners of the 42nd annual William Carlos Williams Poetry Competition from the Department of Family and Community Medicine have been announced.
Judges from the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University evaluated poems submitted by 234 students to select three winning entries, as well as honorable mentions. The first- and second-place winners in this year’s competition were both recognized as honorable mentions last year.
In addition to a monetary award, the top three prize-winning poems will be considered for publication in the Journal of Medical Humanities. They also will be honored in the annual awards ceremony, to be held in a special plenary session of the Health Humanities Consortium's annual conference on Saturday, April 13, from 3-4:30 p.m. mountain time in Phoenix, Arizona.
Congratulations to the winners!
First Place
Jude Okonkwo, above left, a third-year medical student at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, earned first place for the poem, “Escape!” His poem is a tribute to all those who yearn for an escape from illness, inequality and/or fear.
Second Place
Liz Irvin, above center, a third-year medical student at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School on the Population-Based Urban and Rural Community Health Track, earned second place for her poem, “Pathophysiology.”
Third Place
Maya J. Sorini, a narrative medicine scholar, essayist, award-winning poet and medical student at Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine, earned third place for her poem, “Memory Remains Blood Soluble.”
The judges also acknowledged seven honorable mentions this year (listed alphabetically):
- Noah Brazer is a first-year medical student at Yale University School of Medicine. His poem, “Filial Piety,” is named in reference to the Confucius principle, 孝, and seeks to capture the complicated dynamics of his family at the time of his maternal grandfather’s passing in 2021.
- Joshua Chen is a first-year student at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Diagrams of children born with heart defects are common in medical education. His poem, “Tetralogy of Fallot,” is the imagined life of one of those children.
- Liv Davis is a third-year medical student at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine’s Northern Kentucky campus. Her poem, “Separations,” is an exploration of how our experiences in medicine intricately intertwine with and permeate our personal lives.
- Sydney Gray is a first-year student at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians & Surgeons. Her poem, “Table 18,” is dedicated to her father, who is also a poet, and who ceaselessly inspires her to nurture her inner humanism and creativity.
- Mariel Mawad is a first-year student at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. Her poem, “of an immigrant child,” is a tribute to her Filipino roots and her family’s 20-year journey as undocumented immigrants in the U.S.
- Lily Peters is a second-year M.D. student at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. Her poem, “bright red sharp relief,” is a reflection on the strangeness of two lives intersecting in the anatomy lab: her donor’s and her own.
- Natalie Perlov Snyder is a medical student at Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University. Her poem, “Joanne,” is a tribute to her paternal grandmother and the mother of her childhood best friend.
The Plenary Session
Pulitzer-prize-winning poet Natalie Diaz is this year's guest reader during the special plenary session and award ceremony on Saturday, April 13, from 3-4:30 p.m.
Diaz was born on the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe (Akimel O’odham). Diaz is the author of Postcolonial Love Poem, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, finalist for the National Book Award, Forward Prize in Poetry, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and winner of a Publishing Triangle Award. Her first book, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was winner of an American Book Award. She is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, a Lannan Literary Foundation Fellow, a Native Arts and Culture Foundation Fellow, and a former Princeton University Hodder Fellow. She is the 2024 Yale Rosenkranz Writer-in-Residence.
About the Poetry Competition
Founded by Drs. Martin Kohn and Delese Wear in 1982, the William Carlos Williams Poetry Competition remains enthusiastically received and nationally renowned, receiving entries from hundreds of North American students of allopathic or osteopathic medicine each year.