John L. Coulehan

Jack Coulehan was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and migrated to Arizona, North Carolina, and New York somewhere along the line. To paraphrase Anton Chekhov, medicine is his lawful wedded wife (so to speak) and poetry his mistress. Before he retired, Jack practiced primary care medicine at Stony Brook University and directed the medical school's programs in ethics and humanities. Robert Pinsky selected his 2016 collection of poems, The Wound Dresser, as a finalist for the Dorset Poetry Prize. And by the way, Anne is his real wife of over 50 years.

Jack is an Emeritus Professor of Medicine and former director of the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics at Stony Brook University. Jack’s essays, poems and stories appear frequently in medical journals and literary magazines, and his work is widely anthologized. He is the author of seven collections of poetry, including The Talking Cure: New and Selected Poems (Plain View Press, 2020) His other books include Blood & Bone and Primary Care (University of Iowa Press), two co-edited anthologies of poems by physicians; Chekhov’s Doctors, a collection of Anton Chekhov’s medical tales (Kent State University Press); and an award-winning textbook The Medical Interview: Mastering Skills for Clinical Practice (F. A. Davis Co,). Among Jack’s honors are a Pennsylvania Council for the Arts poetry fellowship; the American College of Physicians poetry award; American Nursing Association book of the year award; Master Scholar humanities fellowship of the Philadelphia College of Physicians; Humanities Medal of the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine; and the Nicholas Davies Scholar Award of the American College of Physicians for “outstanding lifetime contributions to the humanities in medicine.”