Laura Kolbe on “Composing Together” in the COVID Ward

“It felt like being on a space shuttle or being at sea. I’ve never been in a space that felt so cordoned from the usual power currents in the hospital. It really felt like a space in which we were all learning together on a new shore.”

Laura Kolbe is a writer as well as a physician and assistant professor of internal medicine at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. Her poems, essays, and stories have appeared recently in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Conjunctions, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, and The Yale Review.

This spring her clinical work and views on patient care during COVID-19 were highlighted in The New Yorker’s “April 15, 2020: A Coronavirus Chronicle,” in coverage by the New York Times (“When am I Coming Home"?: A Tough Month Inside a Virus Recovery Unit”), and on the podcasts The New Yorker Radio Hour (“A City At the Peak of Crisis”) and This Is Your Brain with Dr. Phil Stieg (“COVID’s Invisible Bullet”). She co-created Weill Cornell Medical Center’s COVID Palliative Care and Hospice Unit, and its COVID Recovery Unit, both among the first of their kind in the United States.