Asheen Rama
Shoulder Joint
Pen, Ink, Marker

Tayyeba Ali, MD
Tayyeba K. Ali, MD is a physician writer and ophthalmologist, specializing in cornea and uveitis. After completing her undergraduate education in English literature and creative writing from Agnes Scott College, she went on to earn her medical degree from Emory University School of Medicine. Dr. Ali is currently a medical specialist at Google and also holds affiliate assistant professor positions at the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute (BPEI) and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS). She is keenly interested in international medicine, resident education, and taking a myopic look at the moral crossroads we face in healthcare. As a second generation American, Tayyeba finds herself dwelling on migrant and refugee stories, their need for ethnic and religious identity, and the repercussions of these journeys. She is the fiction editor for Stanford’s medical literary magazine, The Pegasus Review, and has a particular affinity for colons and semicolons.

Damiana Andonova
Damiana Andonova is a graduate student of Health Administration at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. and a research and analytics consultant for a birth equity study at UMass Boston and has served as a volunteer birth doula at Mass General Brigham during the pandemic. She has previously written for several publications including Wander, Write City Magazine, The Pangolin Review, and Motherfigure among others and has completed academic fellowships in ethics, narrative medicine, and obstetrics and gynecology at Multi-departmental Hospital for Active Treatment in Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria, and in Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen, Denmark. Her blogs and thought pieces appear in several health system and consulting firm websites and blogs including NorthShore University Health System, Stanford Medicine 25, the Innova Group, and Sg2.

Steve Asch
Dr. Asch is a professor and physician at Stanford. He is the author of numerous professional articles, but is most proud of his few other short published works of fiction.

David Bell
David Bell is an Australian cardiac surgical trainee working in robotics and computer vision.

Blair Bigham
Blair Bigham is a critical care and emergency medicine physician who splits his time between Toronto and San Francisco. He is also a scientist and journalist who studies and writes about the health systems that help and fail us.

Arjun Byju
Arjun Byju is a 3rd year medical student at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. He graduated from Harvard College in 2017.

Megana Dwarakanath, MD, M.Ed
Megana Dwarakanath is a current adolescent medicine fellow at UPMC in Pittsburgh. She loves tea, green trees, biking, running, writing, and spending time with her husband, Rahul, and their 1 year old daughter, Meera.

Natasha Gupta
Natasha Gupta is the webmaster and provides administrative support for The Pegasus Physician Writers at Stanford and Stanford’s program Medicine and the Muse. She further works at Abbey Neuropsychology Clinic helping children and adults lead full and meaningful lives through multi-modal brain training solutions.

Lauren Edwards, MD
Lauren Edwards is an internist and Clinical Assistant Professor in Stanford’s Department of Medicine, division of Primary Care and Population Health.  While attending medical school at Columbia University she trained in Narrative Medicine and deeply connected to the idea that participating in creative writing and close reading of literature helps make us better doctors. She has created Narrative Medicine curricula for Stanford Internal Medicine Residents since 2015, exploring its impact on burnout, empathy and wellbeing. She is a member of the Stanford Pegasus Physician writers group and an associate editor of the Pegasus Review.  She is also a course co-director and the reflections lead of the Stanford medical school SHIELD course “Walk with Me: A Patient-Centered Exploration of Health and the Health Care System”.

Rachel H. Han, MD
Captain Rachel H. Han is a psychiatry intern at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, MD. She received her B.A. from Wellesley College and her U.S. Army commission through ROTC. She graduated from the F. Edward Hébert School of Medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. She is the 2020 runner-up for the prose category of the Irvin D. Yalom Literary Award for her story, “The Manic Korean Patient: ‘Refusing Labs.’”

Sally Huang, MD
Sally Huang is a native Houstonian and psychiatry resident at Stanford. With a background in religious studies and narrative medicine, she is broadly interested in the medical humanities and how cultivating a relationship with the creative arts can enrich our ability to attend to stories and relationships in the clinical space. Within psychiatry, she has special interests in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, cultural psy​​chiatry, and Asian mental health. You can reach her at sallyhuang@stanford.edu.

James Hyun Lee
James Hyun Lee is a graduate of Yale College and the Mayo Clinic School of Medicine, now working as a psychiatry resident at the University of Washington. He looks forward to the day when he will be able to throw a birthday party for his corgi (he does not currently own a corgi). Until that momentous occasion, James likes to fill his time with baking, freestyle dancing, singing, and spending time with loved ones.

Lisa Jacobs, MD
Lisa Jacobs, MD, MBA is a fellow in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Stanford University who serves as an Editor at Large for The Pegasus Review and the Director of Community Engagement for Pegasus Physician Writers. She completed her adult psychiatry residency at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was the founding editor of The Penndulum, a residents’ magazine. She is a former freelance journalist and is now working on her first book.

Grace Li
Grace Li is a graduate of Duke University, where she studied biology and creative writing, and is currently a medical student at Stanford University. Her debut novel, Portrait of a Thief, will be published in Spring 2022 by Tiny Rep Books/Dutton. You can find her on social media @gracedli or visit her website at www.gracedli.com.

Richard Mamelok, MD
Richard Mamelok is an internist and clinical pharmacologist.  After a brief academic career at UCSF and Stanford he has spent his medical life in the pharmaceutical and biotech world and for the past two decades has had an international consulting business for such companies.  He is the author of a collection of poems, What Grace, and his poems have appeared in several publications. Richard is a transplanted New Yorker and has lived in Palo Alto for 39 years.

Stephen Marcott
Stephen Marcott is a fifth-year medical student at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He has become an advocate for the medical humanities at Stanford, most recently by serving as an editor of The Pegasus Review. He is currently applying to residency programs in anesthesiology. During residency, he looks forward to developing as a writer and applying principles from the medical humanities when caring for patients in the operating room. You can reach him at stm2030@stanford.edu.

William Meffert, MD
Surgeon in Vietnam, Iowa, Haiti, Russia, and China. Flight instructor, carpenter, surgical consultant for Stanford University. Published in: AOPA, The Vietnam Archive, The Evergreen Review, The MacGuffin, Helix Magazine, Ars Medica, Web MD, and others. Le Satan Vini (Satan Comes) was written after the horrible 2010 Haitian earthquake. Arriving a week or so after this catastrophe, I saw many injured people who survived because of good fortunate, some severely injured needing surgical treatment, and many heroes who somehow escaped death and remained working at the Albert Schweitzer Hospital despite grievous family losses.

Trevor Mooney, MD
Trevor Mooney is a psychiatry resident based in Georgia. He will be moving back to his home state of California next year to begin a fellowship in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at UCSF.

Julia Nordgren, MD
Julia Nordgren is a pediatrician and a trained chef. Her clinical practice in Palo Alto focuses on children with high cholesterol, prediabetes, or weight issues. She is has been a member of Pegasus Physician Writers since 2015 and is on the Editorial Board of the Pegasus Review. She  just published her first cookbook, The New Family Table. Her book is a physical expression of  her three great passions: cooking, doctoring, and writing. Her work – both in clinic and in writing – explore our relationships to food, to family, and how we find connection and fulfillment at the table and beyond. Find her – and some recipes  – at drjuliacooks.com.

Jennifer Pien, MD
Jennifer H. Pien is the Associate Director of The Pegasus Physician Writers as well as the Editor-In-Chief of The Pegasus Review. An affiliated Clinical Assistant Professor in the Stanford University Department of Psychiatry, her interests include narrative medicine, human sexuality, and cultural mythologies. She is represented by Lisa Grubka, Fletcher & Co for her upcoming debut novel.

Asheen Rama, MD
Dr. Rama is a clinical instructor in the Department of Anesthesiology at the Stanford School of Medicine. Asheen is part of the Art Design team for the Review and his work Shoulder Joint can be seen in this second edition.

Michelle Riederer
Michelle Riederer is a poet and contributor to The Pegasus Review.

Pablo Romano
Pablo Romano is a fourth-year medical student at Stanford University School of Medicine interested in psychiatry and palliative care. He grew up between the suburbs of Los Angeles and Guadalajara, Mexico and studied Cognitive Science at Occidental College. At Stanford, Pablo created a recurring storytelling series called Talk Rx, where students at the medical school are given speaker coaching and a platform to tell their stories, live and in front of an audience of peers. His own work has appeared in The Intima, Pulse, and The Nocturnists among others. In his free time, he’s likely engaged in conversation with anyone who will listen or catering to Sunny, his twelve-year-old five-year-old chihuahua.

Sarah Rosenbaum
Sarah Rosenbaum is a child and adolescent psychiatrist and is a member of Pegasus Physician Writers at Stanford.

Audrey Shafer, MD
Audrey Shafer, MD is Professor of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine / Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System; founder and director, Stanford Medicine & the Muse Program, Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics; co-director, Biomedical Ethics and Medical Humanities Scholarly Concentration; and co-founder of Pegasus Physician Writers. She completed her undergraduate studies at Harvard University, medical school at Stanford, and anesthesiology training at University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of The Mailbox, a children’s novel on posttraumatic stress disorder in veterans. Her poetry on anesthesia, health humanities and family life includes “The Anesthesiologist Listens,” inspired by Beethoven’s Opus 135, string quartet no. 16 for the joint Pegasus Poets-St. Lawrence String Quartet performance.

Hans Steiner, MD
Dr. Steiner received his Doctor medicinae universalis from the University of Vienna, Austria. He is Professor Emeritus (Hyper-Active) of Psychiatry at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He is the director of The Pegasus Physician Writers at Stanford. As a creative writer, Dr. Steiner has edited a volume of Poetry, Memoirs and Short Stories by The Pegasus Physician Writers, “On Becoming and Being A Doctor”. He has published a psychiatric/literary essay on the psychology of Lisbeth Salander, “If Lisbeth Salander Were Real” in a 2011 volume on “The Psychology of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” (Robyn Rosenberg and Shannon O’Neill, editors). He has published two short stories in 2015 Edition of THE INTIMA, “The Cat Doctor” and “Talking in Toys”.  His recently published poetry includes “Charon’s Ferry Building” in MD magazine; and “Michael Angel” in Academic Psychiatry.

Matt Stevenson, MD
Dr. Matt Stevenson has recently joined the VAPAHCS and Stanford University School of Medicine affiliated faculty in Internal Medicine after completing his residency at Stanford. He is a founder editor of The Pegasus Review and a member of The Pegasus Physician Writers. His teaching and research interests include the medical humanities, Narrative Medicine, and the intersection of individualized and ethical health care practice with the limitations of our existing medical system.

Eleanor Wong
Eleanor Wong is an assistant editor for The Pegasus Review. Eleanor’s areas of interest include creative writing and art.

Josephine Wong
Josie Wong is an assistant editor for The Pegasus Review and is currently attending Woodside Priory. Josie’s areas of interest include creative writing, mental health, art, and social justice.

Irv Yalom, MD
Dr. Irv Yalom joined the psychiatric faculty at Stanford in 1962 and began a career of teaching and research in the area of psychotherapy. After a number of research articles in group therapy he wrote a group therapy textbook, “The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy.” Later he began writing stories and novel about psychotherapy, all meant to be teaching texts and all directed to the young psychotherapist. Later textbooks include “Inpatient Group Psychotherapy, “Existential Psychotherapy,” “Staring At The Sun” and “The Gift of Therapy”. Teaching novels include: When Nietzsche Wept, The Schopenhauer Cure, Lying on the Couch, The Spinoza Problem.Collections of teaching stories include: Love’s Executioner, Creatures Of A Day, and Momma And The Meaning of Life.    

James Yau
James Yau, Senior Developer of The Pegasus Review, is a creative and technical professional based in New York City. When not fulfilling his duties as a Medical Assistant, he works as a freelance videographer.  He also works in film/television/video production in a variety of roles, including Assistant Camera, Camera Operator, and Location Manager.