Richard Bronson

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. While rarely home, he was a distant but powerful force in my childhood. Although I wrote in high school, my interest in poetry withered during my later education. In 1989, 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. There, my interest in poetry was re-awakened. I have been fortunate to live in a vibrant community of poets on Long Island, who nurtured my own development as a poet. I am currently on the Board of Trustees of the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association and the Board of the Long Island Poetry Collective, facilitating its weekly workshop at the Huntington Library. In 2006, I founded Padishah Press, a small press devoted to the publication of poetry informed by the medical experience. I am one of three founding poets of the Astonished Harvest program within the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care and Bioethics at Stony Brook University Medical Center, dedicated to an exploration through poetry of the experiences of illness and healing. My third collection of poems, "Passage," was published in 2014, following the publication of "Search for Oz," in 2006 and "Silent Music," in 2009. I was the recipient of the Leonard Tow 2015 Humanism in Medicine Award of the Arnold P. Good Foundation.