Staff
Editor-in-Chief: Paul Gross
Paul Gross is an assistant professor in the Department of Family and Social Medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine/Montefiore Medical Center. His stories about medical practice and family life have appeared in American Family Physician, Journal of Family Practice, Hippocrates, The Sun, Diversions and Town & Country, and he has conducted award-winning writing workshops for medical professionals, college students, patients and community members. His band, Avalanche at Dawn, is soon to release its third album of original music.
Executive Editor: Diane Guernsey
Diane Guernsey, formerly a senior editor at Town & Country Magazine, wrote on health, medicine and other subjects for Town & Country, Consumer Reports on Health and other publications. Her career embraces other fields as well: a classical pianist, she is on the Manhattanville College music faculty; she is also a licensed psychoanalyst.
More Voices Editor: Dana Cook Grossman
Dana Cook Grossman is the director of publications emerita of Dartmouth Medical School, where for twenty-five years she edited the award-winning quarterly magazine Dartmouth Medicine. She also coedited the book Great Issues for Medicine in the 21st Century (New York Academy of Sciences, 1999). Since her 2011 retirement from Dartmouth, she has been a full-time freelance editor and writer; her clients have included PBS Nova, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the University of California at San Francisco and the Association of American Medical Colleges.
More Voices Editor: Warren Holleman
Warren Holleman is professor of behavioral science at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. He is also a playwright, storyteller, and blogger. His plays have been presented at the Pittsburgh New Works Festival and Wordsmyth Theater Company’s new play development series. He is a Houston Moth Story Slam winner and has appeared on The Moth Radio Hour. He co-hosts So, What's Your Story? on KPFT Pacifica radio, and he blogs at workwellbewell.com.
New Voices Editor: Colette Stanley
Colette Stanley is a family physician who is transitioning into hospice and palliative medicine. She is Caribbean-born, originally from the island of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Colette has always had a love for writing and literature in general. As a child, she wrote poems on the way to school. Her writing now mostly focuses on her experiences in medicine; some of her pieces have been published in Pulse. This is her first official editorial position.
Poetry Editor: Jenna Le
Jenna Le is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011) and A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2018), the latter of which was an Elgin Awards second place winner. She was also a two-time winner of the Poetry By The Sea Sonnet Contest. Her poems appear widely in journals such as AGNI, Los Angeles Review, Poet Lore, and Verse Daily. She lives and works as a physician and educator in New York City.
Poetry Editor: M. Cynthia Cheung
M. Cynthia Cheung is a practicing physician and the author of Common Disaster (Acre Books, 2025). Her poems can be found in AGNI, Four Way Review, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, swamp pink and others. She is a prior Idyllwild Arts Writers Week fellow and serves as a judge for Baylor College of Medicine’s annual Michael E. DeBakey Medical Student Poetry Award. Her website is www.mcynthiacheung.com.
Haiku Editor: Michael Dylan Welch
Michael Dylan Welch has edited the haiku journals Woodnotes and Tundra, and currently coedits First Frost. He cofounded the Haiku North America conference in 1991 and the American Haiku Archives in 1996, and founded the Seabeck Haiku Getaway in 2008 and National Haiku Writing Month (nahaiwrimo.com) in 2010. His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of publications. His website, devoted mostly to haiku, is graceguts.com. Michael lives in Sammamish, Washington.
Visuals Editor: Sara Kohrt
Sara Kohrt is a visual artist and writer with a strong interest in research. She has worked with the health policy research team at Mayo Clinic since 2004 and graduated from Columbia with a master's degree in narrative medicine in 2017. Her first photography research project, WOMAN, was featured in an eighteen-month exhibit at the aSHEville Museum in Asheville, NC; that inspired her to begin more international and domestic PhotoVoice research projects. She also enjoys painting and photographing live music. Her work can been seen at sarakohrt.com.
Web Developer: Christine Seuss
Christine Seuss is the founder and creative director of New York Design Studio, LLC (nyds.net), a web-development and marketing company serving organizations of all sizes since 2000. NYDS was bootstrapped with determination and passion while Christine was in college and has grown to a full-service agency with team members specializing in web design, development, marketing and social media.
Pulse Interns
Faiza Chowdhury
Faiza Chowdhury is a student at Sarah Lawrence College pursuing biomedical sciences and sociology. As a writer interested in a healthcare career and passionate about immigrant advocacy, she is eager to use narrative medicine and her work with Pulse to explore the intersection of these fields.
Cynthia Egwuogu
Cynthia Egwuogu is a student at Sophie Davis School of Biomedical Education, where she is passionate about the intersection of medicine and storytelling. Her hobbies include reading, baking, and exploring nature. She finds joy in the diversity of people's experiences and in the unique stories individuals share in Pulse .
Arthur Erskine
Arthur Erskine is a neuroscience major at SUNY Stony Brook University and member of Bronx Mental Health Leaders, a program for students planning careers in health care. He brings an interest in psychology and in exploring different perspectives on health care to his work with Pulse . He hopes to attend medical school after graduation.
Emeritus Staff
Founding Publisher: Peter Selwyn
Peter Selwyn is chairman of the Department of Family and Social Medicine, and Professor of Family Medicine and Internal Medicine, at Montefiore Medical Center and Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York. He is also the founder and director of the Palliative Care Service at Montefiore Medical Center. Dr. Selwyn authored Surviving the Fall: the Personal Journey of an AIDS Doctor (Yale University Press,1998), which was nominated for the National Book Award. He has researched and published widely on HIV/AIDS, substance abuse, underserved populations and palliative care.
New Voices Editor Emeritus: Olapeju Simoyan
Olapeju Simoyan is a family medicine-trained addiction medicine specialist and founding executive director of research at Caron Treatment Centers, and a professor in the department of psychiatry at Drexel University College of Medicine. Board certified in family medicine, addiction medicine and dental public health, she was the founding editor-in-chief of Black Diamonds, Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine's literary journal. She's recorded an instrumental piano collection, Christmas Melodies, and has published two photobooks, Scranton, A Place to Call Home and The Amazing World of Butterflies.
Poetry Editor Emeritus: Stacy Nigliazzo
Stacy Nigliazzo is an emergency room nurse and the award-winning author of Scissored Moon and Sky the Oar (Press 53). Her poems have appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and JAMA, among other publications. She is co-editor of Red Sky, Poetry on the Global Epidemic of Violence Against Women (Sable Books). She teaches poetry workshops at Grackle & Grackle Writing Enterprises in Houston, Texas.
Poetry Editor Emeritus: Johanna Shapiro
Johanna Shapiro is a professor in the Department of Family Medicine and director of the Program in Medical Humanities & Arts, University of California Irvine, School of Medicine. She is an assistant editor for Family Medicine, specializing in the narrative essay section, special editor, medical humanities, for Journal for Learning through the Arts, and faculty advisor to the UCI-SOM journal Plexus, an annual collection of medical student, patient, staff, and faculty creative works. She has also published original poetry in JAMA, Journal of Medical Humanities, Healing Muse and Journal of Family Practice.
Poetry Editor Emeritus: Judy Schaefer
Judy Schaefer edited the first biographical/autobiographical work by English-speaking nurse-poets, The Poetry of Nursing: Poems and Commentaries of Leading Nurse-Poets (Kent State University Press, 2006); and co-edited the first international anthology of creative writing by nurses, Between the Heartbeats (University of Iowa Press, 1995) and, as well as a second volume, Intensive Care (University of Iowa Press, 2003). She has been published in journals such as Academic Medicine, American Journal of Nursing and The Lancet. Her most recent book is WILD ONION NURSE (Radcliffe, 2010).
Senior Poetry Consultant: Jack Coulehan
Jack Coulehan is a poet, physician, and medical educator whose work appears frequently in medical journals and literary magazines. He is the author of five volumes of poetry, including most recently Bursting With Danger and Music (2012), and co-editor of two anthologies, Blood & Bone and Primary Care: More Poems by Physicians. In 2012 he received the Nicholas Davies Award of the American College of Physicians for “outstanding contributions to the humanities in medicine.”
Haiku Editor Emeritus: Neal Whitman
Neal Whitman's first profession was medical education, but now he revels in his second profession as a poet. His poems have won awards in both Western and Japanese form and his poetry has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Romanian, and Serbo-Croatian. Neal combines his poetry in recitals with his wife, Elaine's, Native American flute and her photography. As a hospice volunteer, he leads prose and poetry workshops for those experiencing the loss of a loved one.
Visuals Editor Emeritus: Justin Sanders
Justin Sanders is a family physician currently pursuing a fellowship in palliative care at Harvard Medical School. His interest in the visual arts led him to a degree in art history, followed by stints in contemporary art galleries in both the US and London. Following medical school at the University of Vermont, he completed a master's in medical anthropology as a US-UK Fulbright Scholar and then did his residency at Montefiore's Residency Program in Social Medicine. He and his family live in Boston, MA.
Web Developer Emeritus: Stephen Yorke
Stephen Yorke is the principal of Weballeycat Associates, Inc. (www.weballeycat.com), a web development company serving primarily nonprofit and not-for-profit clients. He has been involved in web development, database design and web software development and integration since 1997.
Intern Emeritus: Destiney Kirby
Destiney Kirby is a fourth-year MD/MPH student at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the author of the Pulse essay, Everyone Has a Story. While working toward her goal of becoming a family physician with a focus on reproductive justice while she advocates for public health, she continues to pursue her passion for writing about her own experiences and about the world around her.
Intern Emeritus: Layla Maria
Layla Maria is a first-year medical student at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where she is excited to learn and further her passion for medicine. A reader and writer at heart, she looks forward to combining these interests with her work at Pulse.
Intern Emeritus: Nelson Antonio Reyes
Nelson Antonio Reyes is founder of Go The Extra Miles, a nonprofit that helps uninsured and underinsured patients get to and from medical appointments. A cancer survivor, Nelson graduated with honors from Rutgers University with a bachelor's degree in neurobiology and minors in chemistry and in cognitive neuroscience, and was granted the Yolande Rubianes Memorial Award, given to a graduating senior who achieves distinction while overcoming diversity. Author of the Pulse story An American Journey, he will soon be applying to medical school.
