Join LILRC in welcoming Dr. Suzanne Koven, author of Letter to a Young Physician: Notes from a Medical Life (W. W. Norton & Company, May 4, 2021) in conversation with Roxana Robinson. “Suzanne Koven’s Letter to a Young Female Physician is so wise, beautifully written, tender, and full of heart that it should be required reading for every person—young, female, physician, or otherwise. This is a transporting memoir, and an instructive one.” (Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance).
Suzanne Koven was born and raised in New York City. She received her B.A. in English literature from Yale and her M.D. from Johns Hopkins. She also holds an M.F.A. in nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars. After her residency training at Johns Hopkins Hospital she joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School and has practiced primary care internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston for over 25 years. In 2019 she was named inaugural Writer in Residence at Mass General. Her essays, articles, blogs, and reviews have appeared in The Boston Globe, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, The New Yorker.com, Psychology Today, The L.A. Review of Books, The Virginia Quarterly, STAT, and other publications. Her monthly column “In Practice” appeared in the Boston Globe and won the Will Solimene Award for Excellence in Medical Writing from the American Medical Writers Association in 2012. Her interview column, “The Big Idea,” appears at The Rumpus. Suzanne conducts workshops, moderates panel discussions, and speaks to a variety of audiences about literature and medicine, narrative and storytelling in medicine, women’s health, mental healthcare, and primary care.
Roxana Robinson is the author of ten books - six novels, three collections of short stories, and the biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. Four of these were chosen as New York Times Notable Books, two as New York Times Editors’ Choices. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Best American Short Stories, Tin House and elsewhere. Robinson is a scholar of American paintings and an environmentalist, and her essays, criticism and Op-Eds have appeared in The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, The Chicago Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Post, Bookforum, The Nation and elsewhere. She has twice been a finalist for the Balakian Award for Criticism from the NBCC.
Her novel, Cost, won the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance Fiction Award for 2008, and it was listed as one of the Best Books of the Year by the Chicago Tribune, Library Journal, The Seattle Times and The Wall Street Journal. Her novel, Sparta, won the Maine Fiction Award, the James Webb Award from the USMCHF, was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by the BBC, and was short-listed for the Dublin Impac Award.
Robinson has received fellowships from the NEA, the MacDowell Colony and the Guggenheim Foundation, and was named a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library. In 2019 she received the Barnes and Noble “Writers for Writers Award,” given by Poets and Writers.
Code of Conduct
For questions, please email Eliscia Cirrone, ecirrone@lilrc.org.
Professional Development Hours: 1 (.1 CEUs)
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