Brief Visits

SUSAN PALWICK is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, and Clinical Associate Professor of Medical Education at the University of Nevada School of Medicine, where she teaches Narrative Medicine. She has published three novels and a short-story collection. She is a Licensed Lay Preacher in the Episcopal Diocese of Nevada.

“Susan Palwick's poems remind me what I most love about hospital ministry--in her words, 'story understood / as sacrament.' Here are the small mercies and outsized emotions of a night in the E.D., the infinity of human stories unfolding. 'These small rooms bestow / huge gifts,' she writes, 'God’s strangeness shining from each tale[.]'” -- Rabbi Rachel Barenblat, author of 70 faces and chaplainbook |“Susan's collection, Brief Visits: Sonnets From a Volunteer Chaplain, captures well the mood and the feeling of the Emergency Room. I know those rooms. I know those patients. I know those feelings.”  --Marshall Scott, M.Div, Board Certified Chaplain, Past President of the Assembly of Episcopal Healthcare Chaplains.|“Susan Palwick brings us readers through the rings of a purgatory awaiting us all. In spare, delicate, yet sturdy language, Palwick takes us by the hand, tenderly, to introduce us to human catastrophe, medical drama, simple losses, deep deep sorrows. This is a poetic voice of power and force and, as well, a soul of depth and charge.” --Rita Charon, Program in Narrative Medicine, Columbia University