Background

Bonnie A. St. Andrews was born on July 18, 1950, in New York, United States. She was the daughter of Wally and Anne St. Andrews. She had two sisters and one brother.

Education

Bonnie A. St. Andrews began her studies at St. Lawrence University where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree. In 1980 she obtained a Doctor of Philosophy degree in American literature at Syracuse University.

Career

Bonnie A. St. Andrews was the distinguished teaching professor of bioethics and humanities at State University of New York Upstate Medical University from 1997 being before that a professor from 1992. She was the founding editor of SUNY Upstate's journal of literary and visual arts named The Healing Muse and created University Hospital's "Kids in Art" program.

A poet and a scholar, St. Andrews published widely. Her works appear in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Gettysburg Review, JAMA, The Georgia Review, Commonweal, Journal of General Internal Medicine, Midnight Mind, Journal of Genetic Counseling, Pharos, Journal of the American Medical Association, Carolina Quarterly, and Virginia Quarterly, among others. She contributed poetry to anthologies, including Nantucket: A Collection.

Her books include Forbidden Fruit: On the Relationship between Women and Knowledge in Doris Lessing, Selma Lagerlöf, Kate Chopin, and Margaret Atwood (1986), the poetry chapbooks Stealing the Light (1991) and The Healing Muse (1999). Her collection of poems, Learning from Renoir, was published in 2003. In 2018, the book of Bonnie's poetry, Round & Ripe & Wise, was published. Within its pages, a reader can find ample evidence of the poet's talent, grace, and wisdom. Her poems remind of the world's beauty and the possibility of joy.

Achievements

• Bonnie A. St. Andrews is considered to be a brilliant scholar, incisive poet, and trusted colleague. She was recognized as an outstanding teacher, receiving teaching awards from State University of New York Upstate Medical University and Syracuse University's University College. She received the President's Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1992 and was named a SUNY distinguished teaching professor. Her students praised her abilities to inspire and encourage them and admired her wisdom, her wit, and her enthusiasm. Her colleagues valued her brilliant mind, her poetic artistry, and her great warmth. She was also a nominee for Pushcart Prize in 2002 for her poem Phenol.

Works

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• book

  • Forbidden Fruit: On the Relationship Between Women and Knowledge in Doris Lessing, Selma Lagerlof, Kate Chopin, Margaret Atwood 1986
  • Learning from Renoir 2003

Views

St. Andrews' stance towards medicine was complicated. She treated clinicians with a sentiment verging on awe: an amalgam of reverence, respect, and fear.

Quotations: "Far from being separate, art and science, I discovered, are Siamese twins joined at the heart. They are two hands clapping. They are the recto and verso pages of one long and balanced book."

"My poetry moved from images of Nature to those of technology, from lacy tracery to tendon, sinew, musculature, and bone growing like jade inside a mountain. Working with physicians, nurses, clinicians, technologists, therapists, patients, children with oncology opened the arteries of my creative life and saved rather than imperiled it."

"I hope my works praise the courage and compassion of patients and practitioners, of families and intimate strangers within the world of the Healers. And I hope I have helped to place the Arts back in the heart of that world."

"Poetry is not enterprising, having no bottom line even in a couplet. It [has] no motive more profitable than articulating the systole and diastole of the heart."

Membership

Bonnie A. St. Andrews was a member of Poetry Society of America, Poets and Writers, Associated Writing Programs, American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, and Aurora for the Blind.

Personality

Physical Characteristics: The cause of St. Andrews death was a brain tumor.

Connections

Father:

Wally St. Andrews

Mother:

Anne St. Andrews