For our first Literary Lunch Hour of the year, poet Alisha Kaplan joins us to explore a vital question: What nourishes us?

As practitioners, what fuels us so we can do the demanding work of healthcare without burning out? As patients, what feeds us so we can live full, healthy lives? How does this look different for people from varied cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds?

Beyond its critical nutritional value, food is a powerful medium of story. Food is a great equalizer and, at the same time, reveals significant disparities in current medicine. We will chew on how practitioners can build compassionate care systems when people are under-resourced, and how — at the root of the system — is the individual we must nourish.

Through a rich spread of stories, this interactive lunch hour will explore food and narrative as vehicles for self-care and community care. Please bring a snack and/or lunch when you join online, if you are able, so we can practice some deliciously mindful eating together!

Guest

Alisha Kaplan is a poet, educator, and practitioner of narrative medicine. Using the arts, she works with health professionals and patients to reinvigorate medicine with care and humanity.

Alisha holds an MFA in Poetry from New York University and an MS in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University. Her debut collection of poems, Qorbanot: Offerings, a collaboration with artist Tobi Kahn, won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award from the League of Canadian Poets.

Alisha is a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Fellowship and winner of the Hippocrates Prize in Poetry and Medicine, the W.B. Yeats Society of New York Poetry Competition, and the Eden Mills Writers Festival Literary Contest. Her writing has appeared in PRISM International, Carousel, Fence, Lilith, The New Quarterly, and elsewhere. Alisha splits her time between Toronto and Bela Farm. Website