Rafael Campo (poet)

Template:Short description Template:Infobox medical person Rafael Campo (born 1964 New Jersey) is an American poet, doctor, and author.

Early life and education

Rafael Campo was born on November 24, 1964 in Dover, New Jersey to a Cuban Italian family.

Campo graduated with a BA and MA from Amherst College. Compo continued his medical education at Harvard Medical School, graduating with a MD.

Career

Campo began practising internal medicine in the early 1990s. Campos formally practiced medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts and was Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Campo is the poetry editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association. He served as a resident poet at Brandeis University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He frequently reads at colleges, including Brown University, Stanford University, and Colby-Sawyer College. He formerly taught in the Lesley University low-residency MFA writing program in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Poetry

His writing focuses on themes that promote equality and justice for gay people, people of color, and working-class people. His work has served as the inspiration for composers and other artists. His poem "Silence=Death" was set by composer Joseph Hallman and premiered as part of the AIDS Quilt Songbook Project. His work was included in the "Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize" anthologies and has been published on numerous occasions in periodicals such as The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times Magazine, and The Washington Post "Book World".

Philosophy

Rafael Campo believes that medicine should be about treating patients’ diseases and problems while focusing on their humanity. He claims that it would be wrong for a physician to only focus on “the heartless, purely fact-based narrative we record in their charts”. Instead, Campo hopes to inspire physicians through his work to reflect on the experiences of patients and address their needs appropriately, using poetry. Campo argues that poetry can often be crucial to the healing and recovery process.

Awards

• First Prize 2013 Hippocrates Open International Prize for Poetry and Medicine
• National Poetry Series, the Lambda Literary Award
• 1997 Guggenheim Fellowship.

See also

• Cuban American literature
• List of Cuban-American writers
• Latino literature
• American Literature in Spanish

External links

• Annotations at the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database of several Campo works, with links to texts and audio of the poet commenting and reading poems ""The Distant Moon", "Technology and Medicine", "Towards Curing AIDS", "What the Body Told".