KEYNOTE

Mark Doty, Poet, Essayist and Author

About the Speaker

Mark Doty

Poet, Essayist and Author

Praised by the New York Times for his “dazzling, tactile grasp of the world,” Mark Doty is a renowned author of poetry and prose. He is the author of three memoirs: the New York Times-bestselling Dog Years (HarperCollins, 2007), Firebird (1999), and Heaven’s Coast (1997), as well as a book about craft and criticism, The Art of Description: World Into Word, part of the popular “Art of” series published by Graywolf Press. Throughout his writings, he shows special interest in the visual arts, as is evident in his poems and also in his book-length essay, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon (2001). He most recent book is a memoir that centers on his poetic relationship with Walt Whitman, entitled What Is the Grass (W. W. Norton, 2020).

He is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently Deep Lane (W.W. Norton, 2015), a book of descents: into the earth beneath the garden, into the dark substrata of a life. These poems seek repair, finally, through the possibilities sustaining the speaker above ground: art and ardor, animals and gardens, the pleasure of seeing, the world tuned by the word. Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems was published in 2008 and won the National Book Award for that year—in their citation, the National Book Award judges wrote, “Elegant, plain-spoken, and unflinching, Mark Doty’s poems in Fire to Fire gently invite us to share their ferocious compassion. With their praise for the world and their fierce accusation, their defiance and applause, they combine grief and glory in a music of crazy excelsis.” Doty is the first American poet to have won Great Britain’s T. S. Eliot Prize, for My Alexandria (1993), which also received both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other collections of poetry include Turtle, Swan (1987); Atlantis (1995); Sweet Machine (1998); Source (2001); and the critically acclaimed volume, School of the Arts (HarperCollins, 2005).

Former US Poet Laureate Philip Levine remarked, “If it were mine to invent the poet to complete the century of William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, I would create Mark Doty just as he is, a maker of big, risky, fearless poems in which ordinary human experience becomes music.” And Mary Oliver said:  “One of the things that has been constant about Mark Doty’s work, poetry and prose, is his intense search for the exact word or phrase, of whatever issue, which lead him (and us) into the very furnace of meaning within the human story.”

In addition to the National Book Award, Doty has also received two NEA fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, a Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Award, and the Witter Byner Prize. As the award citation for the last of these noted, “Mark Doty’s poems extend the range of the American lyric.” In 2011 Doty was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Doty is a Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University, and also teaches in NYU’s low-residency MFA program in Paris.

Doty is a Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University, and also teaches in NYU’s low-residency MFA program in Paris.

 

 

 

Craig M. Klugman, PhD

About the Speaker

Craig M. Klugman, PhD

Vincent de Paul Professor of Bioethics and Health Humanities, Department of Health Sciences, DePaul University

Klugman is the author of over 650 articles, book chapters, OpEds, and blog posts on such topics as bioethics, professionalism, digital medicine, end-of-life issues, public health ethics, research ethics, education, health/medical humanities, and health policy. Dr. Klugman is the editor of several books including Research Methods in the Health Humanities (Oxford 2019), Medical Ethics (Gale Cengage 2016), and Ethical Issues in Rural Health (2013; 2008). Besides numerous academic journals, his writing has appeared in New York Times, Pacific Standard MagazineHuffington PostChicago TribuneMediumCato UnboundThe HillSan Francisco Chronicle, and the Houston Chronicle. He is the executive producer of the award-winning film Advance Directives and has developed programs using art and improvisational theater to teach health students. He is a voting member of the National Biosecurity Science Board co-founded the Health Humanities Consortium, where he is a member of the Steering Committee, and serves on the clinical ethics committee at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

He has been interviewed for The New York Times, LA TimesChicago Tribune, National Post (Canada) AARP NewsNational Geographic, Reuters, New Republic, New Scientist, Daily Beast, Mashable, NPR, Marketwatch, HBO Vice, ABC News NightlineCBS Evening News, The Doctors, and Univision.

Klugman earned his doctorate in Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch where he wrote his dissertation on Exploring Experiences of Dying: An Analysis of Death Memoirs. He earned an MA in Biomedical Ethics and an MA in Medical Anthropology at Case Western Reserve University. Klugman earned his Bachelor of Arts in Human Biology with honors at Stanford University. He is also a certified death doula.

 

Thaddeus Pace, PhD

About The Speaker

Thaddeus Pace, PhD

Associate Professor in the Colleges of Nursing (Division of Biobehavioral Health Science), Medicine (Department of Psychiatry), and Science (Department of Psychology), University of Arizona, Tucson

Thaddeus Pace, PhD, is a biopsychologist and Associate Professor in the Colleges of Nursing (Division of Biobehavioral Health Science), Medicine (Department of Psychiatry), and Science (Department of Psychology) at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He received his PhD in neuroscience and psychology from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship on human stress immunology at Emory University in Atlanta. His current research at UArizona explores stress biology in populations who experience psychological distress (e.g., cancer survivors and their family members, firefighters). Informed by this work, Dr. Pace also investigates the effectiveness of novel interventions designed to optimize psychological, inflammatory, and endocrine functioning in those at risk for stress-related illness. These include a kindness and compassion meditation program called CBCTÒ (Cognitively-Based Compassion Training), and other contemplative interventions such as the Healthy Minds Program App. Dr. Pace's research is supported by grants from the National Cancer Institute and the National Institutes of Health of the United States. He is a PopTech Science Fellow and was named one of Tucson's “40 Under 40” by the Tucson Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

 
 

Hope Heavenrich

About the Speaker

Hope Heavenrich

Museum educator and founder of Art Matters with Hope focusing on education, professional development and well-being. Hope has been certified in Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction and teaching MBSR through Brown University. She has presented all over the country and Italy on her work infusing the humanities into health care education. Hope has co-published a number of articles on the benefits of using art in health care education and will travel to Paris in June 2023, to present at the Sorbonne’s art and medicine symposium.

 
 

The Rev. Dr. Scott Stoner

About the Speaker

The Rev. Dr. Scott Stoner 

President and Executive Director of the Samaritan Family Wellness Foundation

The Rev. Dr. Stoner is the President and Executive Director of the Samaritan Family Wellness Foundation. He is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and an Episcopal minister with forty years of experience helping individuals, couples, families, and organizations. Through the foundation's work, he writes and trains leaders in offering preventative wellness programs, with a particular focus on resilience. The foundation's two wellness initiatives, Living Compass (faith-based) and Wellness Compass (secular) are used by tens of thousands of individuals and organizations worldwide.

Dr. Stoner has been married to Holly Hughes Stoner (also a therapist) for 45 years. Together, they host the Wellness Compass podcast and are co-authors of The Teen Wellness Compass Notebook and the Parent Wellness Compass Notebook. Scott has a long history with St. John's on the Lake—his grandmother, parents, and in-laws all lived at St. John's, and he served on the board from 2002-2008. In his free time, Scott loves cycling, running, reading, playing music, and spending time with his family, especially his two grandsons.

 
 

Arthur Kleinman, MD

About the Speaker

Arthur Kleinman, MD

Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine and of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor of Anthropology in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Arthur Kleinman (born March 11, 1941) is a physician and anthropologist. A graduate of Stanford University and Stanford Medical School, with a master’s degree in social anthropology from Harvard and trained in psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Kleinman is a leading figure in several fields, including medical anthropology, cultural psychiatry, global health, social medicine, and medical humanities. A China scholar, since 1978, he has conducted research in China, and in Taiwan from 1969 until 1978.

Kleinman is professor of medical anthropology in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine and professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He is the Esther and Sidney Rabb professor of anthropology in the Department of Anthropology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), and was the Victor and William Fung director of Harvard University’s Asia Center 2008 - 2016. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Arthur Kleinman has published seven single authored books including Patients and Healers in the Context of CultureSocial Origins of Distress and Disease: Depression, Neurasthenia and Pain in Modern China; Rethinking Psychiatry; The Illness NarrativesWriting at the MarginWhat Really Matters; and The Soul of Care. His four co-authored books include Reimagining Global HealthA Passion for Society: How We Think about Human Suffering; and Deep China: The Moral Life of the Person. He has also co-edited books on culture and depression; SARS in China; world mental health; suicide; placebos; AIDS in China; and the relationship of anthropology to philosophy (The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy).

His current collaborative projects include a comparative study of eldercare for dementia in six Asian settings; an ethnographic study of trust in the doctor-patient relationship in China; and social technologies for aging and eldercare in China.

 
 

M. Bento Soares, PhD

About the Speaker

M. Bento Soares, PhD

Professor of Cancer Biology and Pharmacology at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria

Dr. Soares received a PhD in Genetics and Development from Columbia University in 1986, where he became faculty in 1989. He worked on the Human Genome Project for many years while at Columbia University and subsequently at The University of Iowa.  He then started applying methodologies from the human genome project to the study of pediatric brain cancer and was recruited to Northwestern University and the Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago to direct a research program on Cancer Biology and Epigenomics. He joined the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria (UICOMP) in 2015 as Head of the Department of Cancer Biology and Pharmacology and Senior Associate Dean for Research, to further research across campus and to bring compassion and emotional balance training to the medical school, for students, residents, and healthcare professionals, while continuing his own research on pediatric brain tumors. He has since become a Senior CBCT® (Cognitively-Based Compassion Training) Instructor, participated in the training of CBCT® teachers, taught numerous CBCT® courses to trainees and healthcare professionals, to teachers in the Peoria Public School, and to the leadership of the Peoria Police Department. He has also become a certified CEB (Cultivating Emotional Balance) Instructor, and an MSC (Mindful Self-Compassion) and SCHC (Self-Compassion for Healthcare Communities) trained teacher. He has taught self-compassion courses and workshops to young African American Women with breast cancer, and to older cancer survivors and patients living with cancer. In early 2020 he started offering an elective discipline that he developed for 3rd and 4th year medical students (CREATE, Compassion, Resilience and Emotional Awareness Training and Education) to students from all campuses of the University of Illinois College of Medicine. Lastly, he is the site PI at UICOMP for the Illinois Precision Medicine Consortium of the All of Us Research Program.

 
 

Tink Tinker, PhD

About the Speaker

Tink Tinker, PhD

American Indian scholar, Professor Emeritus, Iliff School of Theology

A member of the faculty since 1985, Tink Tinker teaches courses in American Indian cultures, history, and religious traditions; cross-cultural and Third-World theologies; and justice and peace studies and is a frequent speaker on these topics both in the U.S. and internationally. His publications include American Indian Liberation: A Theology of Sovereignty (2008); Spirit and Resistance: Political Theology and American Indian Liberation(2004); and Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Genocide (1993). He co-authored A Native American Theology (2001); and he is co-editor of Native Voices: American Indian Identity and Resistance (2003), and Fortress Press’ Peoples’ Bible (2008).

Dr. Tinker has volunteered in the Indian community as (non–stipendiary) director of Four Winds American Indian Survival Project in Denver for two decades. In that capacity he functions in the urban Indian community as a traditional American Indian spiritual leader. He is past president of the Native American Theological Association and a member of the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians.

Firmly committed to the ecumenical movement, he has been active in volunteer capacities with several denominations at the national level, the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches. He currently serves as an “Honorary Advisor” to IMADR, the International Movement against all Forms of Discrimination and Racism; and he also serves locally on the Leadership Council of the American Indian Movement of Colorado. On campus, Tinker works closely both with students of color and with Lutheran students.


Education

  • B.A., New Mexico Highlands University
  • M.Div., Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary
  • Ph.D., Graduate Theological Union

 

 

 

 

 

Bishop Rudolph W. McKissick, Jr. M.Div., D.Min.

About the Speaker

Bishop Rudolph W. McKissick, Jr. M.Div., D.Min   

Bishop Rudolph W. McKissick, Jr., is Senior Pastor of the Bethel Church, located in Jacksonville, Florida. Bethel is the oldest existing Baptist church in the state of Florida, being founded in 1838. Under Bishop McKissick’s leadership, the church has experienced exponential growth to over 10,000 active disciples. Bishop McKissick has established himself not only as a prolific proclaimer but also as an academician, teaching as an adjunct professor at the Samuel DeWitt Proctor School of Religion at Virginia Union University. Bishop McKissick is also the author of several books as well as an accomplished musician with several national, critically acclaimed music projects.

Bishop McKissick has been afforded many national platforms for proclamation, among them being the morning preacher at the prestigious Hampton University Ministers and Musicians Conference as well as the featured conference preacher in the evening; the conference preacher at the John Malcus Ellison Convocation at Virginia Union University (Now the John Ellison/Miles Jones Convocation) and being inducted into the Morehouse School of Religion Board of Preachers.

Bishop McKissick, Jr. also serves on various boards, which include being a board member of the National Action Network, founded by Rev. Al Sharpton, the Board of Trustees of Florida State College at Jacksonville and the Advisory Board to the President at Virginia Union University.

Bishop McKissick, Jr. holds a bachelor’s degree from Jacksonville University with a double major in the field of music: one in Opera and the other in Sacred Church Music, with a minor in pipe organ performance. He holds the Master of Divinity Degree from The School of Theology at Virginia Union University, now the Samuel DeWitt Proctor School of Religion at Virginia Union University, and the Doctor of Ministry Degree from the United Theological Seminary. Bishop McKissick has been awarded the honorary Doctor of Divinity Degree from both Bethune Cookman University as well as Virginia Union University. He is also a member of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc., as well as Sigma Pi Phi Boule (pronounced BOO-LAY).

He is married to the former Kimberly Joy Nichols and they are the proud parents of three beautiful children; Jocelyn, Janai (pronounced JANAY) and Joshua