Writer, physician Rafael Campo to read April 15

Acclaimed writer and physician Rafael Campo will read from his work at 7 p.m. April 15 at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum.

Born in 1964 in Dover, N.J., Campo is a graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Medical School.

He teaches and practices general internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, where his medical practice serves mostly Latinos; gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered people; and people with HIV infection.

Campo is the author of The Other Man Was Me (1994), which won the 1993 National Poetry Series Award; What the Body Told (1996), which won a Lambda Literary Award for poetry; and The Poetry of Healing: A Doctor’s Education in Empathy, Identity, and Desire (1997), a collection of essays (available in paperback as The Desire to Heal), which also won a Lambda Literary Award for memoir.

Other books include Diva (1999), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize and Lambda Literary Awards for poetry; Landscape With Human Figure (2002), which won the Gold Medal in poetry from ForeWord magazine; and, most recently, The Healing Art: A Doctor’s Black Bag of Poetry (2003).

Campo’s poetry and prose have appeared in many major anthologies, including Best American Poetry 1995, as well as in prominent periodicals, including The Lancet, The Nation, The New England Journal of Medicine, The New York Times Magazine, Out, The Paris Review, The Progressive and the Washington Post Book World.

His numerous honors include a Pushcart Prize; a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowship; the annual Achievement Award from the National Hispanic Academy of Arts and Sciences; and an honorary Doctor of Literature degree from Amherst College.

His talk is free and open to the public and is sponsored by The Center for the Humanities and The Writing Program, both in Arts & Sciences, in conjunction with the Kemper Art Museum exhibition Inside Out Loud: Women’s Health in Contemporary Art, on display through April 24. The museum is part of the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts.

For more information, call 935-5576.