Ellen Michaelson

Ellen Michaelson is a physician in Portland, Oregon, and an MFA graduate from Pacific University. Her work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Portland Monthly, Women in Solitude (SUNY Press), and Literature in Medicine. Winner of the 2019 Miami Book Fair/de Groot Prize The Care of Strangers (Melville House), Ellen Michaelson’s debut novel, is a moving story about friendship set in a hospital, where a young woman learns to take charge of her life by taking care of others. Sima, an orderly in a gritty Brooklyn public hospital, is an immigrant who escaped vicious anti-Semitism in Poland. She spends her shifts transporting patients, observing the doctors and residents and quietly nurturing dreams of becoming a doctor herself by going to night school. One credit short of graduating, she finds herself faltering in the face of pressure from her mother to aim lower and settle for the life she has. Everything changes when Sima encounters Mindy Kahn, an intern doctor struggling through her residency. As fellow outsiders, they bond and Sima learns the power of truly letting yourself care for another person. Charles Baxter, author of The Feast of Love noted how “the work of medicine—of saving lives—is closely related to the work of saving oneself, of staying intact under the pressure of work and inherited prejudices.”