Bringing voice to medical practice.

Tension exists in current health and medical practice between the obligation to honor patients and their stories with the requirement to reduce stories to facilitate efficient diagnosis. In this presentation, John Price of the English Department/Creative Nonfiction Program at UNO and Kevin Clouther of the UNO MFA in Writing Program will discuss the importance of patient voice and personhood in literary work and activities as well as in the academic programs they both lead. Marya Hornbacher, award-winning journalist and bestselling author, will also share her perspective on writing and narrative medicine, with emphasis on the importance of patient voice in current health and medical practice.

Marya Hornbacher is the recipient of a host of awards for her books, journalism, essays, and poetry. Shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize for her first book, Marya has spent a prolific twenty-odd years writing and teaching across genres. Her published work includes Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (1998), The Center of Winter (2005), and Madness: A Bipolar Life (2008). She was recently honored with the Annie Dillard Award in Creative Nonfiction.

“The Art of Storytelling: Lyric and Narrative Medicine featuring Marya Hornbacher” will kick-off Passages, the new core literary program at KANEKO.

***If you missed this program, use the button below to watch the discussion with Marya.

About Marya Hornbacher: Marya Hornbacher is an award-winning essayist, journalist, novelist, poet, and the New York Times bestselling author of five books. Her sixth, a work of long-form journalism on psychiatry, neuroscience, and the future of mental health, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2020; she is currently at work on a collection of essays. She is the recipient of the Annie Dillard Award for Nonfiction, a Logan Nonfiction Fellowship, the White Award for Magazine Journalism, the ASCAP Award for Music Journalism, the Fountain House Humanitarian Award, and other distinctions. Her writing has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Boston Globe, Smithsonian Magazine, Crazyhorse, AGNI, Gulf Coast, The Normal School, Fourth Genre, DIAGRAM, and many others. She is a professor in the graduate writing programs at the University of Nebraska-Omaha and Augsburg University.

About John Price: Director of the English Department’s Creative Nonfiction Writing program, Professor Price has authored three books of creative nonfiction, and edited a collection of tallgrass prairie nature writing.  A recipient of a prose fellowship from the NEA and other recognitions, his creative nonfiction has been published in many journals, magazines and anthologies, including Orion, Creative Nonfiction, The Christian Science Monitor, The Iowa Review, and Best Spiritual Writing 2000. To investigate more of Professor Price’s work, visit www.johntprice.com.

About Kevin Clouther: Kevin Clouther was born in Boston and grew up on Cape Cod and in South Florida. His story collection, We Were Flying to Chicago, was published by Catapult. His stories have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Greensboro Review, Gulf Coast, Puerto Del Sol, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn among other journals, and he has contributed essays to The Millions, NPR, Poets & Writers, Salon, and Tin House’s “Art of the Sentence.” He is the recipient of several grants and awards, including the Richard Yates Fiction Award and Gell Residency Award. He holds degrees from the University of Virginia and Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Before joining the University of Nebraska at Omaha, he was Associate Director of the Writing Program at Stony Brook University in New York.

About Passages: Passages is the core literary program at KANEKO that seeks to intersect and expand all offerings and forms of creative literary activities across the Omaha-Council Bluffs Metropolitan area. Passages programming includes critical readings, interactive writing workshops and sessions, and events featuring accomplished and diverse authors.