Suzanne Koven Physician Essayist

Suzanne Koven, received her B.A. in English literature from Yale and her M.D. from Johns Hopkins. She also holds an M.F.A. in nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars. After her residency training at Johns Hopkins Hospital, she joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School and has practiced primary care internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital for over 30 years. She is an associate professor of medicine at HMS and holds the Valerie Winchester Family Endowed Chair in Primary Care Medicine at Mass General.  In 2019 she was named inaugural Writer in Residence at Mass General. Her essays, articles, blogs, and reviews have appeared in The Boston Globe, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, NewYorker.com, Psychology Today, The L.A. Review of Books, The Virginia Quarterly, STAT, and other publications. Her monthly column “In Practice” appeared in The Boston Globe and won the Will Solimene Award for Excellence in Medical Writing from the American Medical Writers Association in 2012. Dr. Koven co-directs the Media and Medicine certificate course at HMS and speaks to a wide variety of audiences on literature and medicine and the role of women in medicine. Her essay collection, Letter to a Young Female Physician, was published by W.W. Norton & Co. in 2021.