Suzanne Koven, MD, MFA

Suzanne Koven received her BA in English literature from Yale and her M.D. from Johns Hopkins. She also holds an MFA in nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars. After her residency training and chief residency in medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital, she joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School and practiced primary care internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital for over 30 years. She is an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School 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. Dr. Koven co-directs the Media and Medicine program 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.