Tana Jean Welch is the author of the poetry collections In Parachutes Descending (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024) and Latest Volcano (Marsh Hawk Press, 2016). Her poetry has appeared in The New York Times, and in journals including The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Prairie Schooner, and The Colorado Review.

Her critical book, Advancing Medical Posthumanism Through Twenty-First Century American Poetry (Palgrave, 2024), places contemporary poetics in dialogue with biomedicine in order to create a framework for advancing a posthuman-affirmative ethics within the culture of medical practice. Welch’s scholarship has been published in Literature and Medicine, Academic Medicine, MELUS, The Journal of Ecocriticism, and elsewhere. Born and raised in Fresno, California, she currently lives in Tallahassee where she is Associate Professor of Medical Humanities at the Florida State University College of Medicine.

“The health humanities complement the interdisciplinary nature of both my poetics and my research, which blends ethics, posthumanism, science, and gender studies to examine the ways politics, culture, and matter shape various bodies. As a poet and a scholar, I am primarily interested in how poetry can encourage us to think both critically and inclusively about our bodily entanglements—the complexity of our physical relationships—while opening our embodied minds to new ways of living.”