Jan Steckel’s full-length poetry book, The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011), won a Lambda Literary Award for LGBT writing. Her chapbooks Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009) and The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006) also won awards. Her fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry have appeared in Yale Medicine, Scholastic Magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, American Journal of Nursing, Red Rock Review, and many other journals. Her writing has won a number of contests and has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize.

Dr. Steckel is a bisexual and disability rights advocate and a Harvard- and Yale-trained former pediatrician. 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. She left the practice of medicine when her longstanding back problems made it impossible for her to continue. She now works from home as a freelance medical copy editor as well as a poet and writer. She lives in Oakland, California, with her husband Hew Wolff, who designed this web site.