Judith Wozniak spent her working life as a doctor. Her poems have appeared in The Alchemy Spoon, Fenland Poetry Journal, Reach Poetry, South, The Frogmore Papers, ARTEMISpoetry, London Grip, Ink Sweat & Tears and, in the anthology, These are the Hands: Poems from the Heart of the NHS (Fair Acre Press, 2020). Her work has been placed in competitions including First Prize and joint Third Prize in the 2020 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine (NHS category) and Second Prize in the Grey Hen Press Competition, 2021. She was selected in The Hedgehog Press White Label Quatre First Collection Competition 2020 and her debut pamphlet Patient Watching was published by The Hedgehog Poetry Press in January 2022. Her second pamphlet, Case Notes, also with The Hedgehog Poetry Press, in June 2024. Her collection Making Dolmades in Essex is forthcoming with Vole books. She has an MA in Writing Poetry from Newcastle University with The Poetry School.
 
Patient Watching, The Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2022
 

Judith Wozniak’s many years of empathetic observation as a GP provide the lens through which she views John Berger’s seminal work describing the life of a country doctor. Add to that her considerable skill as a poet in shaping this moving narrative into a formal sonnet sequence – creating a heroic crown for a heroic man. Elsewhere in this debut pamphlet, she relates her own experiences in medical practice in poems that are vital and compassionate, but never sentimental. The power of her work is to show us ourselves at our most vulnerable, but to find in those moments something redemptive and hopeful.

Tamar Yoseloff

 
 
Case Notes, The Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2024

Through a series of distilled and precisely observed portraits of patients in crisis, the poet offers us a glimpse into the day-to-day physical and emotional challenges facing a family doctor. The vanishing world of the old-style GP who knows her patients and journeys alongside them, often in their last moments, is intimately described, profoundly empathic and at times unbearably moving.

Jacqueline Saphra

The poetry of medicine is in all places, all people – New York to Edinburgh, Sarah Bernhardt to the old woman afraid to upset her doctor by showing her tumour. To feel and find that poetry takes the sensitivity and experience that Judith Wozniak possesses in abundance. To translate it to the page requires a calm discipline that will find the words to enact the eye’s observation and the heart’s compassion. Case Notes reveals on every page that Judith Wozniak is a poet fully and compellingly equal to the task.

Michael Hulse