Rita Charon is a general internist, literary scholar, and founder of the field of narrative medicine. She serves as professor and founding chair of the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics and a professor of medicine at Columbia University. She completed her MD from Harvard in 1978 and her PhD in English from Columbia in 1999. At Columbia, she inaugurated the Master of Science in Narrative Medicine graduate program, where she teaches. She has published in the most prestigious journals in the fields of medicine, science, and literary studies. She is the author of Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (Oxford University Press, 2006/ Libros del Zorzal, 2024) and co-author of Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine (Oxford University Press, 2017). She is co-editor of Stories Matter: The Role of Narrative in Medical Ethics (Routledge, 2002) and Psychoanalysis and Narrative Medicine (Suny Press, 2008).