Explore the connections between literature, culture and health care with three nationally known writers and your colleagues from Maine and across New England. In addition to three formal presentations, there will be small group discussions of readings demonstrating how literature and discussion can offer vicarious experiences and teach about different perspectives. This will not be a diversity training per se, but a way for participants to reflect on trans-cultural issues and engage with colleagues who are concerned about these issues through reading and discussion.

The keynote speaker is Arthur Kleinman, a major figure in medical anthropology and cross-cultural psychiatry. He is the Rabb Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University. The author of The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing & the Human Condition and Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture, he is also a consultant to the World Health Organization and the 2001 winner of the Franz Boas Award of the American Anthropological Association. His talk is titled "Suffering, Culture and Care: How the Moral Basis of Health Care is Threatened in Our Era".

Rafael Campo, a physician and award-winning poet, will speak about how literature has helped him better appreciate, reflect upon, and bridge, the often different life experiences of his patients. Campo practices internal medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and teaches at Harvard Medical School. His books include The Desire to Heal, What the Body Told, Diva, and The Healing Art: A Doctor's Black Bag of Poetry. He has won numerous awards for his writing, including a National Poetry Series award and two Lambda Literary Awards. He has also been a finalist for the National Book Circle Award and a PEN Center West Literary Award.

There will also be a reading by Veneta Masson who has practiced as a registered nurse for 35 years in community and hospital settings both in the United States and abroad. In 1978, she helped to found Community Medical Care, a small, inner-city clinic in Washington, D.C. Since leaving the clinic in 1995, she has published two books, Rehab at the Florida Avenue Grill, a collection of poems about some of those patients whose lives changed hers, and Ninth Street Notebook—Voice of a Nurse in the City, winner of an American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year award for 2001.

Books by each speaker will be available for purchase at the conference.

Imagine What It's Like: Literature as a Bridge Between Cultures has been developed with the help of an advisory committee of health professionals from the State of Maine's Migrant Health Program, the University of Maine, the University of Southern Maine, Portland Public Health, and the University of New England.