Susan J. Sample
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Photo by Cat Palmer
New Book —2024
Susan Sample’s poems are stunning. She has a rare gift—the ability to go beneath the surface narrative with honesty, tenderness and the wisdom gained in years of tending the dying, both her family and her patients. “Just say I love,” she writes in one poem. In this collection, she is saying she loves, even when loving is hard.
—Courtney Davis, poet, author, and co-editor, Between the Heartbeats:
Poetry and Prose by Nurses
and Prose by Nurses
Trapped in the Bone-House suffuses personal elegy with a medical researcher’s knowledge of how we care for the sick and dying. In these tender, searching poems, Sample not only explores the grief of losing her parents but the emotional and practical ways in which the patients she works with navigate the complexities of their own care. Here, Sample investigates the many ways and types of language we use to approximate the experience of living as mortal beings. This is a book that explores how we come to terms—if we ever do—with the body’s betrayals, and the ways we memorialize and survive our losses.
—Paisley Rekdal, past Utah Poet Laureate and author of West: A Translation
NOW AVAILABLE @ https://mainstreetragbookstore.com/product/trapped-in-the-bone-house-susan-j-sample
Events
March 28, 2024 The King’s English Bookshop, Salt Lake City, UT Details: https://www.kingsenglish.com/event/susan-j-sample-trapped-bone-house
April 26, 2024 Palliative Care & Hospice Symposium, Salt Lake City, UT Details: https://utahafp.org/events/palliativecare2024/
Books
Kimberly R. Myers: "This book is essential reading for adolescents and young adults with chronic or terminal illness—and for their parents. The poems of young transplant survivors enable us to glimpse how it feels to live as though perpetually suspended , as if on borrowed time. Through her stories of these remarkable young people, Dr. Sample weaves a tapestry that illuminates distinctive, intimate concerns about identity, body image, belonging, hope, survival and mortality.”
Available on Amazon and from Emerald Publishing: https://books.emeraldinsight.com/book/detail/voices-of-teenage-transplant-survivors/?k=9781800435193
Natasha Saje: “Susan Sample’s collection of poems has at its center a mind that makes sense of the unfathomable—and a voice that sings the unsayable. Integrating science with detailed experiences of a father’s final years and death makes the poems precise, but it’s the ‘exhilarating radiance’ of the poet’s gift that drives the poems, compelling us to read and reread them. I wish this book for everyone facing the loss of a parent.”
Available on Amazon and from Finishing Line Press: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/some-unsayable-blue-by-susan-sample/
Andrea Hollander: “The oxymoronic title of Susan Sample’s fine collection, Terrible Grace, is not misleading. In poem after poem, the speaker manages to face serious losses with palpable grace.”
Winner of the 2009 Utah Arts Council’s Original Writing Competition
Available at: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/terrible-grace-by-susan-sample/
About
Susan J. Sample is a poet, writer, teacher, and editor. As Writer-in-Residence at Huntsman Cancer Institute, University of Utah, she has guided patients, caregivers, physicians, and staff for nine years in reflecting upon and writing about their experiences. As associate professor in the University’s Department of Internal Medicine, she teaches medical humanities and reflective writing to physicians and trainees.
Her writing has appeared in recent years in literary journals, including Tupelo Quarterly, Crab Creek Review, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, ellipsis, and Ekphrasis. She has published in medical and medical humanities journals, including Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Journal of Clinical Oncology, Hektoen International: A Journal of Medical Humanities, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, and The Healing Muse.
Previously, she wrote as a newspaper reporter and medical journalist. As editor of the award-winning Health Sciences Report magazine at the University of Utah, she was the first to interview and profile geneticist Mario Capecchi. When he won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Medicine, her story was quoted worldwide. She won national awards for the publication she subsequently created, The Power of Inquiry: A Tribute to Mario R. Capecchi, Ph.D., 2007 Nobel Laureate.
She received her B.A. in philosophy from Whitman College and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Arizona. She completed her Ph.D. in communication, focusing on rhetoric, narrative, and medicine, at the University of Utah. Her research explores the rhetorical ways physicians and patients use narrative, particularly how physician-trainees use narrative when writing about experiences with patients at the end of life.
