Jan Steckel

Jan Steckel is a writer, a bisexual activist, and a Harvard- and Yale-trained former pediatrician. Over fifty of her short stories, poems and nonfiction pieces have appeared in print and online publications such as Scholastic Magazine, Yale Medicine, Margin and Lodestar Quarterly. Her work has won writing awards and has been widely anthologized.

She served as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic and cared for Spanish-speaking families in California at a county hospital and at a large HMO. In 2001, she left the practice of medicine to write full-time. She is currently circulating a poetry chapbook manuscript and working on a book-length collection of interrelated short stories, several of which have appeared in print. She lives in Oakland, California, with her husband Hew Wolff.

Mary Meriam's review of Jan's chapbook of poems, The Underwater Hospital:

Jan Steckel's poet persona witnesses all kinds of suffering, pain, sickness, and death. She is a physician, and she has been trained to alleviate these things. But she can't, and that is a nightmare. But she can pray. She can examine her conscience and her behavior. And she can make poems that may soften the hard hearts of the world. These poems feel like a human body speaking, telling its tales of woe. Is the body drowning in the Underwater Hospital? Or has the body finally found a place of comfort and healing? Submarine light / flooded the chamber / as we rose / and rose. I have a feeling that the body will rise, if Jan Steckel is the physician in charge.

Excerpt from poem, 'Tiresias', in The Underwater Hospital

So light her touch
so soft her tongue
blue-veined ankles
vellum skin
cover her mouth with yours
pin her to the sheets
unleash in her the riot in you
make her feel what you feel
make her twist under your hand
till she bursts like a muscat
with a sweeter taste than summer

© Jan Steckel