Writing poetry and practicing medicine may be different disciplines, but they’ve lyrically merged in the life of Aidan Kunju, a second-year student at the Miller School. In the midst of his academic rigors, he’s found a creative outlet that requires language instead of science.

In Kunju’s mind, the two are not mutually exclusive. “Poetry demands a precision that corresponds with the way a physician must be a master detective who reads between the lines and discerns meaning in what isn’t seen,” he said.

Growing up in Texas and California, Kunju enjoyed other forms of creative expression besides writing, including painting. “People who go into medicine are stereotyped as math and science nerds,” he noted, “but I was a science and English nerd. I liked putting words together in unique ways.”

Kunju, the child of Indian immigrants, did just that with his poem Lunch Break, Brave Face.

The poem comprises 15 lines in four stanzas. Each line has a break in the middle, giving the poem a right side and a left side. The poem captures a moment in a day during the pandemic lockdown, when Kunju’s internist mother, Aysha Kunju, M.D., comes downstairs for lunch after seeing patients on Zoom. She has multiple sclerosis but is carrying on with her work.

So unique were his words that the poem was one of two first-prize winners of the 2023 Paul Kalanithi Writing Award, bestowed by Stanford University’s School of Medicine for works that address patients and providers facing chronic or life-limiting illness. The ode was published this past summer in Anastomosis, Stanford Medicine’s humanities and literary journal.

Growing up with a physician in the family introduced Kunju to the significant role doctors play in their patients’ lives. “You see your mom come home during the holidays with cards from her patients and little gifts from their gardens and you say, ‘Wow,’” he said.

Through her, Kunju came to better understand the patient perspective and what it means to have an illness, which he expresses in his poetry. “Dealing with the illness of a family member has a lot of powerful emotions associated with it,” he said. “It can be overwhelming, and poetry is a way to get the highlights and emphasize what you want to say, to get a clear message across.”