Yoshiko Iwai

Yoshiko Iwai

Graduate Student, Creative Nonfiction & Narrative Medicine, Columbia University

Yoshiko Iwai is a second-year master’s student working towards her MFA in Creative Nonfiction and MS in Narrative Medicine. She is from Kobe, Japan, and graduated from the University of Michigan with a BFA in Dance and BS in honors Neuroscience where she conducted research on Parkinson’s Disease. Currently, she is writing her MFA thesis — an essay collection exploring the vernacular around pain and mortality, drawing on memoir, research, and phenomenology. Yoshiko is also a Chair’s Fellow for the Graduate Writing Program and teaches creative writing at a correctional center in New York. In the future, she hopes to integrate narrative medicine and creative writing into medical education.

Working Group Affiliation

Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture