Rafael Campo (poet)

Rafael Campo (born 1964 New Jersey) is an American poet, doctor, and author.

Life

He graduated from Amherst College and Harvard Medical School. He practices medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts. His writing focuses on themes that promote equality and justice for gay people, people of color,^[1] and working-class people.

He served as a resident poet at Brandeis University and the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. He frequently reads at colleges, including Brown University, Stanford University,^[2] and Colby-Sawyer College. He currently instructs in the Lesley University low-residency MFA writing program in Cambridge, Massachusetts.^[3]

Work

His work has served as the inspiration for composers and other artists. His"Silence= Death" based on the poem of the same name was set by the composer, Joseph Hallman ^[4] and premiered as part of the AIDS Quilt Songbook Project.^[5]

Awards

• First Prize 2013 Hippocrates Open International Prize for Poetry and Medicine^[6]
• National Poetry Series, the Lambda Literary Award
• 1997 Guggenheim Fellowship.^[7]

Works

• The Other Man Was Me: A Voyage to the New World. Arte Publico Press. 1994. ISBN 978-1-55885-111-5. 
• What the Body Told. Duke University Press. 1996. ISBN 978-0-8223-1742-5. 
• The Desire to Heal: A Doctor's Education in Empathy, Identity, and Poetry. W.W. Norton. 1997. ISBN 978-0-393-04009-8. 
• Diva. Duke University Press. 1999. ISBN 978-0-8223-2417-1. 
• Landscape with Human Figure. Duke University Press. 2002. ISBN 978-0-8223-2890-2. 
• The healing art: a doctor's black bag of poetry. W. W. Norton & Company. 2003. ISBN 978-0-393-05727-0. 
• The enemy. Duke University Press. 2007. ISBN 978-0-8223-3960-1. 

References

External links

• Bio
• Annotations at the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database of several Campo works, with links to texts and audio of the poet commenting and reading poems ""The Distant Moon", "Technology and Medicine", "Towards Curing AIDS", "What the Body Told".