Four Yale School of Nursing (YSN) students took top prizes in prose and poetry and earned honorable mention status at the 2024 Program for Humanities in Medicine (PHM) Health Professions Creative Medical Writing and Art Contest. Recipients were honored on May 2 at the Child Study Center in New Haven, CT.
Courtney Hart ’25 MSN | First Place, Prose
Hart is a nurse midwifery/women’s health student and her prose entry, “These Small Things,” opens on a family tragedy in 1988. The essay then skips through time to milestones in 2019, 2022, and the very recent past.
I was with my mother when she discovered that my brother’s heart had stopped, on his due date. Until then, she’d had a healthy, uncomplicated pregnancy. A true knot in the umbilical cord, we discovered later, was what caused Brennan’s death. I was ushered out to the receptionist’s desk to draw, blissfully unaware of my mother’s emotional wreckage contained by the door behind me as she waited for my father to come. I imagine that the receptionist did the best she could with me, in an office made for adults. I wonder if they have crayons by now—maybe just a few in primary colors, paper peeling off, and a well-worn coloring book, for times like these.
Terri Motraghi ‘26 MSN| First Place, Poetry
Motraghi is a clinical research nurse and online MSN candidate in the psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner specialty. In her prize-winning poem, “Care Taker,” the narrator makes a road trip with her family in honor of a special occasion.
But “a nurse’s work is never finished,” and the celebrant realizes that she has provided all of the festivities herself.
Zeynep Inanoglu ’24 MSN | Honorable Mention
A pediatric NP primary care student, Inanoglu’s artwork is acrylic on wood, approximately four inches square. The subject’s clear brown eyes gaze directly at the observer, a manicured hand resting against her chin and cheek. The portrait is set against a bright green backdrop dotted with floating blood cells. The piece was created in 2021.
Inanoglu was previously saluted as an honorable mention in this forum in 2022 for the acrylic on canvas piece “Mom and me.”
Jean Claudine Raimondi ’25 MSN | Honorable Mention
A psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioner (NP) student in the online MSN program, Raimondi was recognized for a graphite on paper submission titled, “Kapatid ko,” which means “my brother” in Tagalog. The drawing is a rendition of her youngest brother, Yuri, who died by suicide in 2021.
“I honor him with this drawing, as well as with my current pursuit of a master’s in nursing degree here at Yale University to become a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner,” Raimondi wrote in the object’s description.
This drawing is one of three in the series called, “Love is in the eyes of the beholder—from three continents to one heart.”