Seeking students for creative writing workshop

Workshop leader biographies

Bud Shaw, M.D., was born in Cleveland and grew up in a town of 12,000 people in south central Ohio. He received his bachelor's degree in chemistry at Kenyon College and his M.D. from Case Western Reserve University, completed general surgery training in Utah, and a transplant surgery fellowship in Pittsburgh under the direction of Tom Starzl, M.D., the father of liver transplantation. After two additional years in Pittsburgh, one as surgery faculty, Dr. Shaw moved to Omaha in 1985 to start the solid organ transplant program at UNMC, and served as chairman of the UNMC Department of Surgery from 1997 to 2009.

His love for writing began at an early age when, in second grade, he wrote a story about ponies that his mother tried to revise. In 1996, he took 10 months off to write a novel that remains hidden on his hard drive. He attended the Kenyon Review Writer's Workshop in 2007 and was one of the original participants in Steve Langan's Seven Doctors Project in 2008. In 2011, Susan Orlean chose his essay, "My Night with Ellen Hutchinson," as the winner of a writing contest hosted by Creative Nonfiction. The essay received special mention among the 2013 Pushcart Prize entries. His first book, "Last Night in the OR: A Transplant Surgeon's Odyssey," was released by the Plume imprint of Penguin Random House in 2015.

Jennifer Yalof, Psy.D., is a clinical psychologist and the director of behavioral health wellness and education for UNMC. She received her B.S. in psychology and English writing, with a focus on fiction writing from the University of Pittsburgh, her M.Ed. from Temple University in counseling psychology, and her Doctorate of Psychology degree (Psy.D.) in clinical psychology from the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology. She served as an editor and contributing writer for a psychology-related website, a guest writer for other projects, and interned at a publishing house in London. Dr. Yalof likes to engage in creative writing workshops and is working on an anthology of short stories. She enjoys discussing psychological concepts and thought as it pertains to the humanities.