Clarity, wisdom, and resilience: shortlisted and commended young poets in the 2018 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine

With £500 for the Young Poets Award, the Hippocrates Young Poets Prize for Poetry and Medicine  is one of the highest value poetry awards in the world for a single poem by a young poet. The Young Poets award is supported by healthy heart charity the Cardiovascular Research Trust.
The 2018 Hippocrates Young Poet Award is being judged by Toronto poet Alisha Kaplan who has shortlisted and commended poems from the USA and the UK.
In the running for the £500 2018 Hippocrates Young Poets Prize are Haemaru Chung from New York City, for Alice; Margot Armbruster, from Wisconsin, USA for Husk; and Taylor Fang from Logan, Utah, USA for two poems: Letter to Body Made Hollow and On the Evolution of Cancer.  
The following poets were commended: Miles Johnston McInerney from San Diego, USA for 20 Reasons Why I Can’t Order in a Restaurant; Vivian Lu from Cherry Hill, New Jersey, USA for Case Study on Grief; Lara Wise from Oundle in England for In Quarantine; Sabina Holzman from Laguna Beach, California, USA for Panic Attack as a House Fire in the City;  Shannon Lin from Santa Clara, California, USA for Passing; and Taylor Fang from Logan, Utah, USA for Scale of Bone Density, Azure. 

Poetry Foundation, Chicago

About the Young Poet entries she said: “I am in awe of the clarity, wisdom, and resilience with which these young poets write. Weaving medical language with lyrical, they give raw, honest depictions of both physical and mental illness. These poems are written with the vision one can gain when malady or death enters and pervades one’s world, changing its colors, textures, tempo.”
She added: “There are many candid elegies to bodies transformed visibly or invisibly by illness, addressed to loved ones as well as to the poets’ own selves. At times whispering, at times keening, these voices face their pain and grief, and out of their suffering make something beautiful, something true.”
The winning, shortlisted and commended poems in the 2018 Hippocrates Young Poets Prize will be published in the annual Hippocrates Prize Anthology. The 2018 Hippocrates Prize Anthology will be launched at the 2018 Hippocrates Awards ceremony at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago on Friday 11th May.
Notes for editors
For photos of finalists, biographies and extracts of their poems, call 07494 450805  or email hippocrates.poetry@gmail.com
The Hippocrates Initiative – winner of the 2011 Times Higher Education Award for Innovation and Excellence in the Arts – is an interdisciplinary venture that investigates the relationship between medicine and poetry.
More on support for the 2018 Hippocrates Awards for Poetry and Medicine

The 2018 Hippocrates Young Poets Prize is supported by the Cardiovascular Research Trust, a healthy heart charity founded in 1996, which promotes research and education for the prevention and treatment of disorders of the heart and circulation. The charity has a particular interest in avoiding preventable heart disease through educating school students.

The 2018 Hippocrates Open Awards and Health Professional Awards are supported by the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine. The FPM is a UK medical society founded in 1918, which publishes the international journals the Postgraduate Medical Journal and Health Policy and Technology. 

The 9th Annual Symposium on Poetry and Medicine is supported by:

• Center for Bioethics & 
Medical Humanities, Northwestern University 
Feinberg School of Medicine
• Harvard Medical School
• Hippocrates Initiative 
for Poetry & Medicine
• The Poetry Foundation

Caring for the marvelous and the fragile: shortlists announced for 2018 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine

The judges - Carol Rumens from Bangor in North Wales, Peter Goldsworthy from Adelaide in Australia and Mark Doty from New York City have just agreed 4 shortlisted poets for the Health Professional Prize and a further 4 shortlisted poets for the Open Prize. Entries for the 2018 Hippocrates prize were received from 37 countries and from 5 continents.
Competing for the Open Prize are Joanne Key from Crewe in England for Colony, Sarah Ann Leavesley from Droitwich in England for At breaking point, Aniqah Choudhri from Didsbury in  England for Repeat Prescriptions and Raphael Dagold from Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan for Pharmacology.
In the running for the Health Professional Prize are Inez Garzaniti from Pontiac in the USA for Cranial Nerve Shadowbox, Stephen Harvey from Nashville in the USA for The Thirteenth Floor, Maria Ji from Onehunga in New Zealand for Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Patient and Emma Storr from Leeds in England for Six Week Check.
Commendations were also agreed for entrants from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, England, Northern Ireland, Norway, Sweden and the USA - 19 in the Open category and 20 in the Health Professional Category.
Judge Carol Rumens said: “A good poem is like a blood transfusion. It replenishes the body of words, the language in which the poem is written. These prize-winning and commended poems sometimes highlight the metaphorical possibilities of a scientific vocabulary: one of the valuable aspects of the Hippocrates Prize is that it encourages such creative cross-fertilisation. But they also demonstrate that the borders stereotypically perceived between art and science cease to matter in the heat of imaginative and lived engagement.“
Judge Mark Doty said: “Caring for the marvelous and fragile thing a human body is, those who work in the healing professions live in intimate relation with what it is to be alive. Every day they face our vulnerability, as well as their own.  That’s why so many have second lives as poets; writing can be a way to keep their own hearts open, giving form to feeling they must often hold at bay while they attend to what patients need.”
He added: ”The humane and moving work shortlisted for the Hippocrates Poetry Prizes testify to the power of poetry to help us to negotiate the difficult. In carefully crafted, artful language, they demonstrate how the wellspring of compassion renews itself In us again and again.” 
Judge Peter Goldsworthy said: ”Sometimes pus, sometimes a poem…but always pain,’ the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai wrote, a near-perfect poetic distillation of the costs of creativity, at least ‘sometimes’    Of course not all great art has its genesis in pain, and not all pain – not even a fraction – leads to the partial consolations of art.  But if lancing an abscess is the surest way to healing,  poetry can  offer that same cleansing of emotional wounds - at least, again, ‘sometimes’.   As can humour;  and jokes are a species of poem, sharing its same search for precision, density, rhythm, timing - perfection.”
He added: ”There are many species of  poem  here - dark, poignant, epigrammatic, celebratory, funny - which caused me many headaches when judging their merits.  How to separate apples from oranges - and grapes, and melons, and durians?   In the end I can only applaud the  endless capacity of  the poets  - and the language -  for creativity, for compassion, for generosity, for courage under fire - and all their various subspecies of humour.”
See more on the shortlisted and commended poets on the Hippocrates Poetry website.

Poetry Foundation, Cbicago

The winners will be announced at the 2018 Hippocrates Awards ceremony at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago from 4pm on Friday 11th May when the Hippocrates Awards Anthology will be launched. There is also a reading at the Poetry Foundation by Mark Doty from 7pm on Thursday 10th May, an accompanying conference on poetry and medicine that morning and afternoon at Northwestern University in Chicago, and a workshop on poetry, medicine and art at Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art on Friday evening, 11th May.
With an awards fund of £5500 the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine is one of the highest value poetry awards in the world for a single unpublished poem. The 2018 Hippocrates Prize is supported by medical charity the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine and the healthy heart charity the Cardiovascular Research Trust.
Since it was launched in 2010, the Hippocrates Prize has attracted over 8000 entries from over 60 countries, from the Americas to Fiji and from Finland to Australasia.
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Notes for editors
For photos of finalists, biographies and extracts of their poems, call 07494 450805  or email hippocrates.poetry@gmail.com
The Hippocrates Initiative – winner of the 2011 Times Higher Education Award for Innovation and Excellence in the Arts – is an interdisciplinary venture that investigates the relationship between medicine and poetry.
The 2018 Hippocrates Young Poets Prize 
More on support for the 2018 Hippocrates Awards for Poetry and Medicine

The 2018 Hippocrates Open Awards and Health Professional Awards are supported by the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine. The FPM is a UK medical society founded in 1918, which publishes the international journals the Postgraduate Medical Journal and Health Policy and Technology. 

The 2018 Hippocrates Young Poets Prize is supported by the Cardiovascular Research Trust, a healthy heart charity founded in 1996, which promotes research and education for the prevention and treatment of disorders of the heart and circulation. The charity has a particular interest in avoiding preventable heart disease through educating school students.https://thefpmuk.wordpress.com/

The 9th Annual Symposium on Poetry and Medicine is supported by:

• Center for Bioethics & 
Medical Humanities, Northwestern University 
Feinberg School of Medicine
• Harvard Medical School
• Hippocrates Initiative 
for Poetry & Medicine
• The Poetry Foundation