Debby Jo Blank is a primary care physician in Tucson, Arizona. Her medical training was in Boston at Tufts, Harvard and a three-year Sloan Fellowship at MIT. She won the Faulkner Prize for Poetry in 2008 and has been short-listed for the Hippocrates Prize, the Black Lawrence Award and was a finalist for both the St. Lawrence Award and the Joy Harjo Contest. In 2012 she was awarded the W.D. Snodgrass Fellowship. She has studied in the MFA program at Lesley University and studied writing at Sarah Lawrence, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Poetry Week of San Miguel de Allende, Iowa Writer's Workshop, ASU and as an Undergraduate at Stanford. She hikes in the Sonoran Desert in the American Southwest, a greenbelt of cacti, Palo Verdes, Mesquite, Cottonwoods and other indigenous plants hardy enough to withstand the summer heat and the winter freeze. She has volunteered in hospice and at the Poetry Center of the University of Arizona.