Skip navigation Jump to main navigation Jump to main navigation

Applications for 2024 Columbia Summer Session programs are now open!

Close alert

April Narrative Medicine Rounds with Anna DeForest

Anna DeForest: A History of Present Illness

We are excited to host Anna DeForest, neurologist and palliative care physician and author of the novel "A HISTORY OF PRESENT ILLNESS," called "brutal and brave...one of the best in the 'making of a doctor' genre" by Booklist. This is DeForest's debut novel and marks her as a significant new voice in the literary world, bringing truths in her fiction to which many of us have no access.  According to The New York Times, "A HISTORY OF PRESENT ILLNESS offers us the perspective of a doctor who feels everything. Her writing is dreamlike and fragmentary, a sequence of vivid scenes that the reader must piece together, like a puzzle, to understand who exactly is telling us this story.  The answer, tucked in the book's last pages, is a revelation." Anna's work has appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review, The Journal of the American Medical Association, The New England Journal of Medicine, and The Paris Review.  Anna has an MFA from Brooklyn College and an MD from Columbia University. This event will be supported by live captioning. 

Headshot of author next to featured book cover