My poetry appears or is forthcoming in Rattle, The Healing Muse, Marin Poetry Anthology, California Quarterly, Ars Medica, Pulse, American Journal of Nursing, and Nursing2023, among other journals and anthologies.
I am a founding member of two writing groups: a poetry critique group which continues to meet monthly after twenty years, and a group focusing on study, writing and critique, that still meets weekly after more than five years. I am also a co-host for the monthly poetry reading series, Rivertown Poets.
My first full-length collection of medical narrative poetry based primarily on my nursing career, entitled “Standing in Their Fire,” will be published by Kelsay Books, Fall of 2025.
NEW BOOK COMING SOON!
Shawna’s first poetry collection, entitled “Standing in Their Fire” is based on her thirty-five year career as a hospital nurse. It is due out Fall of 2025.
Here you will find an honest, ground-level view of what it’s really like at the interface between healer and patient, the close calls, the bonding, the shared privacies all the way down to the touch and aroma at the heart of healing. As such it removes the mask that colors our understanding and what we see is that in this opening-up there is an “artful and lovely” aspect even at the peak of pain and suffering. What is achieved here is that in the most isolating of circumstances there can be, by this “standing in” at the bedside, an almost spiritual companionship that endures and sustains through the pain and perils of illness.
–David Watts, M.D. author of Bedside Manners (Stories) and Katy Bridge (Poetry)
Shawna Swetech’s poems are both brutal and tender, testifying to the body’s vulnerability, and the beauty of our humanity even in—perhaps especially in—moments of extremis. Drawing on her decades-long nursing career for vibrant details that nail the scene, Swetech brings us inside the hospital rooms where she encounters suffering and courage, agony and transcendence.
–Alison Luterman, author of Desire Zoo and In the Time of Great Fires