Guest Speaker: Keynote by Perri Klass

Perri Klass, MD, is Professor of Journalism and Pediatrics at New York University and Co-Director of NYU Florence; she practices pediatrics at Bellevue Hospital. She attended Harvard Medical School and completed her residency in pediatrics at Children’s Hospital, Boston. Her new book, The Best Medicine: How Science and Public Health Gave Children a Future, is an account of how victories over infant and child mortality have changed the world (originally published as A Good Time to Be Born).

Quirky Kids: Understanding and Supporting Your Child With Developmental Differences, which she coauthored with Eileen Costello, M.D., was published by the American Academy of Pediatrics in a new edition in 2021.

Perri began writing about medicine and about medical training when she was a medical student; her accounts were collected in her two books, A Not Entirely Benign Procedure: Four Years as a Medical Student, and Baby Doctor: A Pediatrician’s Training, which were originally published in 1987 and 1991, and were reissued as classics of the genre in updated editions in 2010. Her most recent book of medical journalism is Treatment Kind and Fair: Letters to a Young Doctor and her most recent novel is The Mercy Rule.  For many years, she wrote the weekly column, “The Checkup” in The New York Times.  Her medical journalism has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Smithsonian, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and The New England Journal of Medicine.  Her other nonfiction includes Every Mother is a Daughter: the Neverending Quest for Success, Inner Peace, and a Really Clean Kitchen, which she coauthored with her mother, Sheila Solomon Klass.

Perri is the National Medical Director of Reach Out and Read. She ran the National Center from its inception through 2006, during which time the program grew from a single site to a national program with thousands of sites serving millions of children. Through her work at the ROR National Center she has trained thousands of medical providers in the ROR strategies of early literacy promotion. She has spoken extensively on behalf of ROR, including participating in panels at the White House Conference on Global Literacy in September 2006, and at the UNESCO Literacy Conferences in Qatar and Mali in 2007, in addition to presentations at many hospitals and academic medical centers across the United States. Through her work with Reach Out and Read, Perri has been able to integrate her commitment to the health care of young children with her love of the written word. In an essay on the program, she wrote, “When I think about children growing up in homes without books, I have the same visceral reaction as I have when I think of children in homes without milk or food or heat: It cannot be, it must not be. It stunts them and deprives them before they’ve had a fair chance.”

Perri has received numerous awards for her work as a pediatrician and educator; including the 2007 American Academy of Pediatrics Education Award, which recognizes her educational contributions which have had a broad and positive impact on the health and well-being of children and the 2011 Alvarez Award from the American Medical Writers Association. In 2016 the American Academy of Pediatrics honored her with The Arnold P. Gold Foundation Humanism in Medicine Award, citing the impact that she has made through her writing, service as an educator, and leadership in promoting early literacy through Reach Out and Read. In April 2021 Perri was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.