Columbia Narrative Medicine

12/18/2025

"This year marks the 25th anniversary of Columbia’s Program in Narrative Medicine, founded by general internist Rita Charon, MD, PhD, who introduced the phrase “narrative medicine” into the lexicon of medical education..."

➡️ Read the full article: https://www.vagelos.columbia.edu/about-us/columbia-medicine-magazine/fall-2025/featured-stories/how-treat-patient-work-art

As Columbia celebrates 25 years of narrative medicine, students are using acrylic paint to depict pain, instructors are teaching with comics, and providers are listening to patients as though reading.

12/09/2025

*Rescheduled Event From September 2025* JOIN US TOMORROW on Wednesday December 10th at 6pm EST for our rounds. We have the distinct honor of welcoming Lidia Yuknavitch, the National Bestselling author of four novels: Thrust, The Book of Joan, Dora: A Headcase, and The Small Backs of Children, winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Awards Ken Kesey Award for Fiction as well as the OBA Reader's Choice Award. Her newest memoir, Reading the Waves, was published by Riverhead books in 2025.

In Reading the Waves, Yuknavitch draws from her complex past — her father's abuse, her relationship with her disabled mother, the loss of her child, and her sexual relationships with men and women — to harness the power of literature and storytelling to reframe her memories. As an author and teacher, she uses this creative insight to transform her wounds into a source of emotional growth and restoration.
By turns candid and lyrical, stoic and forgiving, blunt and evocative, Reading the Waves reframes memory to show how crucial this process can be to gaining a deeper understanding of ourselves.

In addition, Yuknavitch has published a critical book on war and narrative, Allegories Of Violence (Routledge). The Misfit's Manifesto, a book based on her recent TED Talk published by TED Books in 2017. Verge, a collection of short fiction released in 2020. Her widely acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water was a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for creative nonfiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Award Reader's Choice.

She has also had writing appear in publications including Guernica Magazine, Ms., The Iowa Review, Zyzzyva, Another Chicago Magazine, The Sun, Exquisite Co**se, TANK, and in the anthologies Life As We Show It (City Lights), Wreckage of Reason (Spuytin Duyvil), Forms at War (FC2), Feminaissance (Les Figues Press), and Representing Bisexualities (SUNY), as well as online at The Rumpus.

Yuknavitch founded the workshop series Corporeal Writing in Portland Oregon, where she teaches both in person and online. She received her doctorate in Literature from the University of Oregon. She is a very good swimmer.

Chaya Bhuvaneswar is a practicing physician, writer and PEN /American Robert W. Bingham Debut Fiction award finalist for her story collection WHITE DANCING ELEPHANTS: STORIES, which was also selected as a Kirkus Reviews Best Debut Fiction and Best Short Story Collection and appeared on "best of" lists for Harper's Bazaar, Elle, Vogue India, and Entertainment Weekly. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Salon, Narrative Magazine, Tin House, Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, The Sun, The Millions, Joyland, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Awl, and anthologized elsewhere. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, Community of Writers, Kimmel Harding Nelson, Helene Wurllitzer and Sewanee Writers Conference.

MORE INFO & REGISTRATION:
https://www.mhe.cuimc.columbia.edu/narrative-medicine/public-programming-and-events/narrative-medicine-rounds/december-10th-narrative-medicine-rounds-lidia-yuknavitch

We have the distinct honor of welcoming Lidia Yuknavitch, National Bestselling author speak about her newest memoir, Reading the Waves.

12/05/2025

*Rescheduled Event From September 2025* JOIN US NEXT WEEK on Wednesday December 10th at 6pm EST for our rounds. We have the distinct honor of welcoming Lidia Yuknavitch, the National Bestselling author of four novels: Thrust, The Book of Joan, Dora: A Headcase, and The Small Backs of Children, winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Awards Ken Kesey Award for Fiction as well as the OBA Reader's Choice Award. Her newest memoir, Reading the Waves, was published by Riverhead books in 2025.

In Reading the Waves, Yuknavitch draws from her complex past — her father's abuse, her relationship with her disabled mother, the loss of her child, and her sexual relationships with men and women — to harness the power of literature and storytelling to reframe her memories. As an author and teacher, she uses this creative insight to transform her wounds into a source of emotional growth and restoration.
By turns candid and lyrical, stoic and forgiving, blunt and evocative, Reading the Waves reframes memory to show how crucial this process can be to gaining a deeper understanding of ourselves.

In addition, Yuknavitch has published a critical book on war and narrative, Allegories Of Violence (Routledge). The Misfit's Manifesto, a book based on her recent TED Talk published by TED Books in 2017. Verge, a collection of short fiction released in 2020. Her widely acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water was a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for creative nonfiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Award Reader's Choice.

She has also had writing appear in publications including Guernica Magazine, Ms., The Iowa Review, Zyzzyva, Another Chicago Magazine, The Sun, Exquisite Co**se, TANK, and in the anthologies Life As We Show It (City Lights), Wreckage of Reason (Spuytin Duyvil), Forms at War (FC2), Feminaissance (Les Figues Press), and Representing Bisexualities (SUNY), as well as online at The Rumpus.

Yuknavitch founded the workshop series Corporeal Writing in Portland Oregon, where she teaches both in person and online. She received her doctorate in Literature from the University of Oregon. She is a very good swimmer.

Chaya Bhuvaneswar is a practicing physician, writer and PEN /American Robert W. Bingham Debut Fiction award finalist for her story collection WHITE DANCING ELEPHANTS: STORIES, which was also selected as a Kirkus Reviews Best Debut Fiction and Best Short Story Collection and appeared on "best of" lists for Harper's Bazaar, Elle, Vogue India, and Entertainment Weekly. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Salon, Narrative Magazine, Tin House, Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, The Sun, The Millions, Joyland, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Awl, and anthologized elsewhere. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, Community of Writers, Kimmel Harding Nelson, Helene Wurllitzer and Sewanee Writers Conference.

MORE INFO & REGISTRATION:
https://www.mhe.cuimc.columbia.edu/narrative-medicine/public-programming-and-events/narrative-medicine-rounds/december-10th-narrative-medicine-rounds-lidia-yuknavitch

We have the distinct honor of welcoming Lidia Yuknavitch, National Bestselling author speak about her newest memoir, Reading the Waves.

12/04/2025

“Narrative Medicine: Its History, its Applications, and its Use in Clinical Settings”

⭐️ Diane Rehm interviews Columbia Narrative Medicine faculty, Lynne Bamat Mijangos, RN, MSW, M.F.A., M.S.

➡️ https://dianerehm.substack.com/p/narrative-medicine-its-history-its

12/02/2025

JOIN US TOMORROW on Wednesday December 3rd at 6pm EST for our rounds.

For our December rounds, we have the pleasure of welcoming Antoinette Cooper, a visionary writer, TEDx speaker, Collective Trauma Facilitator, and founder of Black Exhale. Her work, featured in The Poetry Foundation, lntima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, and others, explores intersections of race, gender, health, and ancestral healing. Cooper holds an MFA from Columbia University and serves on the advisory board for CUNY's Narrative Medicine program. Her debut book of poetry, UNRULY, was published in 2025.

In Unruly, Antoinette Cooper weaves poetry, memoir, and documentary evidence into an ineffable work of embodied storytelling. UNRULY honors the Black female body as a site of profound resilience and complex histories.

With uncompromising honesty and lyrical precision, Cooper explores the intimate experiences of Black women-from historical medical abuses to contemporary health disparities, intergenerational trauma, societal beauty standards, and personal encounters with violence and healing. UNRULY refuses silence by (re)claiming our often unspoken and inviolable voice.

This revelatory reading experience, at once deeply personal and universally resonant, offers a nuanced exploration of how past and present intertwine in Black women's bodies. Cooper's genre-defying approach invites us to witness ancestral legacies while envisioning paths to integration and liberation, announcing her as an essential voice in contemporary literature. UNRULY offers language to articulate the full spectrum of Black women's embodied realities-in all their pain, power, and possibility.

Zahra H. Khan (she/her) is an educator and editor whose research, writing, and community engagement focus on facilitating critical consciousness in medical education and developing frameworks for abolitionist and healing-centered possibilities in health care. She is on the editorial board of Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, and a lecturer in the Graduate Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University. Zahra teaches courses exploring how the arts, humanities, and storytelling can be leveraged to address key issues impacting the health and safety of our most vulnerable communities, and how narrative can be a tool to drive meaningful action. She is the co-author of “Abolition Medicine” in The Lancet and “Abolitionist Reimaginings of Health” in the AMA Journal of Ethics, among other pieces. Zahra is currently the Storytelling and Media Producer at Interrupting Criminalization, leading the Beyond Do No Harm national storytelling project, which amplifies the stories of health care providers interrupting criminalization in health care.

MORE INFO & REGISTRATION:

For our December rounds, we have the pleasure of welcoming Antoinette Cooper, a visionary writer, TEDx speaker, Collective Trauma Facilitator, and founder of Black Exhale.

11/25/2025

JOIN US NEXT WEEK on Wednesday December 3rd at 6pm EST for our rounds.

For our December rounds, we have the pleasure of welcoming Antoinette Cooper, a visionary writer, TEDx speaker, Collective Trauma Facilitator, and founder of Black Exhale. Her work, featured in The Poetry Foundation, lntima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, and others, explores intersections of race, gender, health, and ancestral healing. Cooper holds an MFA from Columbia University and serves on the advisory board for CUNY's Narrative Medicine program. Her debut book of poetry, UNRULY, was published in 2025.

In Unruly, Antoinette Cooper weaves poetry, memoir, and documentary evidence into an ineffable work of embodied storytelling. UNRULY honors the Black female body as a site of profound resilience and complex histories.

With uncompromising honesty and lyrical precision, Cooper explores the intimate experiences of Black women-from historical medical abuses to contemporary health disparities, intergenerational trauma, societal beauty standards, and personal encounters with violence and healing. UNRULY refuses silence by (re)claiming our often unspoken and inviolable voice.

This revelatory reading experience, at once deeply personal and universally resonant, offers a nuanced exploration of how past and present intertwine in Black women's bodies. Cooper's genre-defying approach invites us to witness ancestral legacies while envisioning paths to integration and liberation, announcing her as an essential voice in contemporary literature. UNRULY offers language to articulate the full spectrum of Black women's embodied realities-in all their pain, power, and possibility.

Zahra H. Khan (she/her) is an educator and editor whose research, writing, and community engagement focus on facilitating critical consciousness in medical education and developing frameworks for abolitionist and healing-centered possibilities in health care. She is on the editorial board of Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, and a lecturer in the Graduate Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University. Zahra teaches courses exploring how the arts, humanities, and storytelling can be leveraged to address key issues impacting the health and safety of our most vulnerable communities, and how narrative can be a tool to drive meaningful action. She is the co-author of “Abolition Medicine” in The Lancet and “Abolitionist Reimaginings of Health” in the AMA Journal of Ethics, among other pieces. Zahra is currently the Storytelling and Media Producer at Interrupting Criminalization, leading the Beyond Do No Harm national storytelling project, which amplifies the stories of health care providers interrupting criminalization in health care.

MORE INFO & REGISTRATION:

For our December rounds, we have the pleasure of welcoming Antoinette Cooper, a visionary writer, TEDx speaker, Collective Trauma Facilitator, and founder of Black Exhale.

11/21/2025

JOIN US Wednesday December 3rd at 6pm EST for our rounds.

For our December rounds, we have the pleasure of welcoming Antoinette Cooper, a visionary writer, TEDx speaker, Collective Trauma Facilitator, and founder of Black Exhale. Her work, featured in The Poetry Foundation, lntima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, and others, explores intersections of race, gender, health, and ancestral healing. Cooper holds an MFA from Columbia University and serves on the advisory board for CUNY's Narrative Medicine program. Her debut book of poetry, UNRULY, was published in 2025.

In Unruly, Antoinette Cooper weaves poetry, memoir, and documentary evidence into an ineffable work of embodied storytelling. UNRULY honors the Black female body as a site of profound resilience and complex histories.

With uncompromising honesty and lyrical precision, Cooper explores the intimate experiences of Black women-from historical medical abuses to contemporary health disparities, intergenerational trauma, societal beauty standards, and personal encounters with violence and healing. UNRULY refuses silence by (re)claiming our often unspoken and inviolable voice.

This revelatory reading experience, at once deeply personal and universally resonant, offers a nuanced exploration of how past and present intertwine in Black women's bodies. Cooper's genre-defying approach invites us to witness ancestral legacies while envisioning paths to integration and liberation, announcing her as an essential voice in contemporary literature. UNRULY offers language to articulate the full spectrum of Black women's embodied realities-in all their pain, power, and possibility.

Zahra H. Khan (she/her) is an educator and editor whose research, writing, and community engagement focus on facilitating critical consciousness in medical education and developing frameworks for abolitionist and healing-centered possibilities in health care. She is on the editorial board of Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, and a lecturer in the Graduate Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University. Zahra teaches courses exploring how the arts, humanities, and storytelling can be leveraged to address key issues impacting the health and safety of our most vulnerable communities, and how narrative can be a tool to drive meaningful action. She is the co-author of “Abolition Medicine” in The Lancet and “Abolitionist Reimaginings of Health” in the AMA Journal of Ethics, among other pieces. Zahra is currently the Storytelling and Media Producer at Interrupting Criminalization, leading the Beyond Do No Harm national storytelling project, which amplifies the stories of health care providers interrupting criminalization in health care.

MORE INFO & REGISTRATION:

For our December rounds, we have the pleasure of welcoming Antoinette Cooper, a visionary writer, TEDx speaker, Collective Trauma Facilitator, and founder of Black Exhale.

11/04/2025

JOIN US TOMORROW on Wednesday November 5th at 6pm EST for our rounds.

For our November rounds, we have the honor of hosting Binnie Kirshenbaum, the author of one story collection and eight novels, including Rabbits for Food (2019), a darkly comic depiction of a clinically depressed woman and her subsequent breakdown and, Counting Backwards (2025), which chronicles the lives of a middle-aged woman and her husband who is suffering
from early-onset Lewy body dementia.

Counting Backwards begins with hallucinations. From their living room window, Leo sees a man on stilts, an acting troupe, a pair of swans paddling on the Manhattan streets below. Then he’s unable to perform simple tasks and experiences a host of other erratic disturbances, none of which his doctors can explain. Leo, 53, a research scientist, and Addie, a collage artist, have a loving and happy marriage. They’d planned on many more years of work and travel, dinner with friends, quiet evenings at home with the cat. But as Leo’s periods of lucidity become rarer, those dreams fall away, and Addie finds herself less and less able to cope with an increasingly unbearable present.

Eventually, Leo is diagnosed with early onset dementia in the form of Lewy body disease. Life expectancy ranges from 3 to 20 years. A decidedly uncharacteristic act of violence makes it clear that he cannot live at home. He moves first to an assisted living facility and then to a small apartment with a caretaker, where, over time, he descends into full cognitive decline. Addie’s agony, anger, and guilt result in self-imposed isolation, which mirrors Leo’s diminished life. And so for years, all she can do is watch him die—too soon, and yet not soon enough.

Kirshenbaum's novels have been selected as Notable and Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, and NPR, among others. Her work has been translated into eleven languages. She is a Professor of Fiction at Columbia University School of the Arts.

Carlie Hoffman is the author of three poetry collections, including One More World Like This World (Four Way Books, 2025), a Library Journal “Title to Watch,” and When There Was Light (2023), winner of the National Jewish Book Award. She is also the translator from German of Blütenlese by Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger (World Poetry Books, 2026) and the forthcoming essential poems of Rose Ausländer.

Her work has appeared in Poetry, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day program, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Slowdown, among others. Hoffman is the founding editor of Orange Editions/Small Orange Journal and has taught at Columbia University, NYU, and SUNY Purchase. Her honors include a “Discovery”/Boston Review prize, a Poets & Writers Amy Award, and fellowships from the Goethe-Institut, Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, Columbia University, Convent Arts, and Yetzirah.

MORE INFO & REGISTRATION:

For our November rounds, we have the honor of hosting Binnie Kirshenbaum, the author of one story collection and eight novels.

10/29/2025

JOIN US NEXT WEEK on Wednesday November 5th at 6pm EST for our rounds.

For our November rounds, we have the honor of hosting Binnie Kirshenbaum, the author of one story collection and eight novels, including Rabbits for Food (2019), a darkly comic depiction of a clinically depressed woman and her subsequent breakdown and, Counting Backwards (2025), which chronicles the lives of a middle-aged woman and her husband who is suffering
from early-onset Lewy body dementia.

Counting Backwards begins with hallucinations. From their living room window, Leo sees a man on stilts, an acting troupe, a pair of swans paddling on the Manhattan streets below. Then he’s unable to perform simple tasks and experiences a host of other erratic disturbances, none of which his doctors can explain. Leo, 53, a research scientist, and Addie, a collage artist, have a loving and happy marriage. They’d planned on many more years of work and travel, dinner with friends, quiet evenings at home with the cat. But as Leo’s periods of lucidity become rarer, those dreams fall away, and Addie finds herself less and less able to cope with an increasingly unbearable present.

Eventually, Leo is diagnosed with early onset dementia in the form of Lewy body disease. Life expectancy ranges from 3 to 20 years. A decidedly uncharacteristic act of violence makes it clear that he cannot live at home. He moves first to an assisted living facility and then to a small apartment with a caretaker, where, over time, he descends into full cognitive decline. Addie’s agony, anger, and guilt result in self-imposed isolation, which mirrors Leo’s diminished life. And so for years, all she can do is watch him die—too soon, and yet not soon enough.

Kirshenbaum's novels have been selected as Notable and Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, and NPR, among others. Her work has been translated into eleven languages. She is a Professor of Fiction at Columbia University School of the Arts.

Carlie Hoffman is the author of three poetry collections, including One More World Like This World (Four Way Books, 2025), a Library Journal “Title to Watch,” and When There Was Light (2023), winner of the National Jewish Book Award. She is also the translator from German of Blütenlese by Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger (World Poetry Books, 2026) and the forthcoming essential poems of Rose Ausländer.

Her work has appeared in Poetry, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day program, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Slowdown, among others. Hoffman is the founding editor of Orange Editions/Small Orange Journal and has taught at Columbia University, NYU, and SUNY Purchase. Her honors include a “Discovery”/Boston Review prize, a Poets & Writers Amy Award, and fellowships from the Goethe-Institut, Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, Columbia University, Convent Arts, and Yetzirah.

MORE INFO & REGISTRATION:

For our November rounds, we have the honor of hosting Binnie Kirshenbaum, the author of one story collection and eight novels.