Artist at Work by ms. Tea / Tracy Ducasse, via Flickr.

Artist at Work by ms. Tea / Tracy Ducasse, via Flickr.

First off, here’s some (perhaps) startling news: the work you’ll find in our Art of Nursing department might not be by a nurse or even about nursing, although of course it often is. It will somehow pertain to health or health care, and it will—we heartily believe—be worth the reader’s while. So, whether you’re a nurse or not, if you’re thinking about sending us a poem or visual art, why not give it a whirl? (We’ll also consider very short fiction—950 words or less.) As long as your work makes a connection to health or health care, is previously unpublished, and is well made, we’ll consider it happily.

Of course, we have published poetry and visual art by RNs and LPNs and NPs who work in settings as varied as hospital ICUs and EDs, dermatology clinics, schools, and hospices. We’ve also published the work of several physicians, two reference librarians, an Episcopalian priest, and a high-school sophomore, among others. Some have won awards, shown in galleries, been widely published. And a few are just beginning to try their hand at writing poems or making art.

How a given piece in Art of Nursing connects to health and health care is often immediately clear. See, for instance, the following (for the cleanest view, when the link opens, click on “Article as PDF”): Therese Cipiti Herron’s series of paintings titled “Nursing Caps,”  Ed Kashi’s photograph of an elderly woman in “Tornado Victim,” Atar Hadari’s poem about a nurse tending a fellow stabbed through his Hawaiian shirt in “My Name Is Pablo Chanto,”  or Ron Giles’s prose poem “Rounds with the Public Health Nurse, 1966.”  Sometimes the association is subtler, as in Charles Kaiman’s “New Mexico Desert, Late Winter”  or Laurie Kutchins’s “Song for the Coming of Winter,”  but it’s there.

To get an even better sense of what sort of written or visual artwork makes it into Art of Nursing, take a look at previous issues (Art of Nursing is always free; you may need to click through to page 2 or 3 of an issue’s table of contents). Acceptance is based on peer review, and with only 12 spots a year, space is limited. Submission guidelines can be found here. Questions? Write to me at sylvia.foley@wolterskluwer.com. I hope you’ll let us consider your creative work. Who knows? Yours might be the submission that startles, tantalizes, makes us weep or grin—and gets itself published.—Sylvia Foley, AJN senior editor

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