Since Rafael Campo was recently featured as the speaker at the Amherst World AIDS Day Dinner, it seemed appropriate to make him Campus Celebrity and find out a little bit about what he’s done. He was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey in 1964. He graduated from Amherst in 1987, and then went on to Harvard Medical School. This is where my jealousy mixed with extreme admiration sets in. Most of the people I know, myself included, are either science/math people, or writing/literature people. Campo does it all, and he does it well. He simultaneously teaches and practices internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and is on the faculty at the Lesley University Creative Writing MFA program. He is a poet and a doctor. His medical practice serves mostly Latinos, GLBT people, and people with HIV. He writes, teaches, practices medicine, and is saving the world! Talk about impressive multi-tasking!
Campo has written several books of poetry that have won all kinds of prizes. His book The Other Man Was Me won the 1993 National Poetry Series Award. His book What the Body Told won a Lambda Literary Award for Poetry. And the list of awards goes on… He also wrote a book of essays on poetry and healing, Healing Art: A Doctor’s Black Bag of Poetry, in 2003. Our good old alma mater awarded him an honorary Doctor of Literature degree. If I could accomplish a third of what Campo has accomplished, I would be proud! Poets, this is a proof that you too could have a chance in the science world!