Wounded Storytellers: Mothers of Patients Speak 

8-9AM

UCSF Parnassus Campus, N-217

The Department of Pediatrics and UCSF Medical Humanities welcomes writers Maria Hummel and Monica Wesolowska, sharing their stories of caring for children. They will be addressing the different ways parents react to bad news, how to deal with conflicts in the family and medical teams, and understanding chronic and terminal illness as an altered life-narrative.

Monica Wesolowska is the author of the memoir Holding Silvan: A Brief Life which was named a "Best Book of 2013" by both The Boston Globe and Library Journal and is forthcoming in German and Polish. She’s published fiction and nonfiction in many other venues including the New York Times. In addition to speaking at hospitals, she teaches creative writing at UC Berkeley Extension. Read more about her work at www.monicawesolowska.com.

Maria Hummel’s poetry and prose have appeared in Poetry, New England Review, Narrative, Creative Non- fiction, and The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine. She is also the author of two novels: Motherland (Counterpoint, 2014) and Wilderness Run (St. Martin’s, 2003). A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, she teaches at Stanford University and lives in San Francisco with her husband and two sons.