The Columbia Narrative Medicine Journalism Workshop is hosting its next installment of its Dialogues on Medical Journalism with Perri Klass, award-winning, writer, physician, and professor of journalism and pediatrics at NYU, Tuesday, February 27 at 7:00 PM on Zoom.
Klass will be interviewed by workshop director, journalist and author Stephen Fried, and members of the workshop alumni group.
Perri Klass is Professor of Journalism and Pediatrics at New York University. She attended Harvard Medical School and completed her residency in pediatrics at Children’s Hospital, Boston. At NYU, she was the Director of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute from 2011 to 2017, and the Co-Director of NYU Florence at Villa La Pietra from 2019 to 2023; she is currently the Director of the Medical Humanities Minor.
Her book, The Best Medicine: How Science and Public Health Gave Children a Future, (originally published as A Good Time to Be Born) is an account of how victories over infant and child mortality have changed the world. She coauthored with Eileen Costello, M.D., Quirky Kids: Understanding and Supporting Your Child With Developmental Differences, published in 2021 in a new revised edition from the American Academy of Pediatrics. She began writing about medicine and about medical training when she was a medical student; her accounts were collected in her two books, A Not Entirely Benign Procedure: Four Years as a Medical Student, and Baby Doctor: A Pediatrician’s Training. Her most recent book of medical journalism is Treatment Kind and Fair: Letters to a Young Doctor. She has written regularly about children’s issues for The New York Times for many years, and her medical journalism has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including Harpers, Atlantic, Smithsonian, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The New England Journal of Medicine, and Harvard Medicine. Her other nonfiction includes Every Mother is a Daughter: the Neverending Quest for Success, Inner Peace, and a Really Clean Kitchen, which she coauthored with her mother, Sheila Solomon Klass.
Perri is the National Medical Director of Reach Out and Read, a national program which promotes early literacy through pediatric primary care, with guidance about reading aloud for parents and children’s books provided at routine well child visits. She ran the National Center from its inception through 2006, during which time the program grew from a single site to a national program with thousands of sites serving millions of children; the program now reaches 4.2 million children a year, 80% of whom are growing up in poverty. Through her work with Reach Out and Read, Perri has been able to integrate her commitment to the health care of young children with her love of the written word. In an essay on the program, she wrote, "When I think about children growing up in homes without books, I have the same visceral reaction as I have when I think of children in homes without milk or food or heat: It cannot be, it must not be. It stunts them and deprives them before they've had a fair chance."
She has received numerous awards for her work as a pediatrician and educator including the 2007 American Academy of Pediatrics Education Award, which recognizes her educational contributions that have had a broad and positive impact on the health and well-being of children; the 2006 Women’s National Book Association Award; and the 2011 Alvarez Award from the American Medical Writers Association. In 2016 the American Academy of Pediatrics honored her with The Arnold P. Gold Foundation Humanism in Medicine Award, citing the impact that she has made through her writing, service as an educator, and leadership in promoting early literacy through Reach Out and Read. In April 2021 Perri was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
To register, fill out this form. The workshop assistant, Meg Gladieux (mkgladieux@gmail.com) will send you a Zoom link before the session, as well as a short list of Klass’s stories that are likely to be discussed, the day before the session.
Previous speakers in this medical journalism dialogue series have included Dr. Helen Ouyang, Dr. Danielle Ofri, Dr. Dhruv Khullar, Dr. Robert Wachter, Dr. Pam Belluck, and Dr. Daniella Lamas.
Since the inception of the Narrative Medicine Journalism Workshop in 2020, its members—who previously had little or no experience writing for the lay press—have published pieces they developed in the group setting in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Vox.com, the Washington Post, the New York Daily News, Nautilus magazine, Ms. magazine, the Seattle Times, Backpacker (where one workshop member was helped to develop a regular medical column), and others. The workshop is part of Columbia’s Narrative Medicine StudioLab, which is sponsored by the Division of Narrative Medicine of the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics, under the direction of founder and chair Rita Charon.
The workshop receives funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
For more information on the Narrative Medicine Journalism Workshop contact stephenfried@comcast.net.
If you have any logistical questions about the session, reach out to workshop assistant Meg Gladieux (mkgladieux@gmail.com).
