This poem is included in the digital library as part of a partnership between the OHSU Library and the Northwest Narrative Medicine Collaborative to share Narrative Medicine curriculum and the items used in those teaching sessions. For additional information about how the poem is used in teaching and a community driven context, please visit Accessible Narrative Medicine website.

Ada Limón, author of The Hurting Kind, as well as five other collections of poems, is of Mexican-American descent. She was born in Sonoma, California and now resides in Lexington, Kentucky. Limón is the twenty-fourth US Poet Laureate. (Source: poets.org).