Alise Leiboff received her undergraduate degree from Johns Hopkins University in 2021, where she studied the Medical Humanities, French, and the Visual Arts. She then went on to obtain a Master’s in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University in 2023. Now a medical student at Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine, Leiboff seeks to tread the common ground between the health sciences, literature, and the arts.

George MacLeod is a writer and interdisciplinary artist based in Philadelphia. Before joining the team, two of their nonfiction pieces were featured in Tendon, in addition to a wacky livestream video that showcased their very own shoulder surgery. Most recently, their video essay Winter Games was presented as a weeklong site-specific installation from sunset to sunrise at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia. In 2022, they founded This and That, a print magazine featuring articles in the realm of personal essay. When they aren’t editing at Tendon, they’re out drafting fundraising appeals for Philadelphia’s children’s museum, or editing anything that their friends throw at them—from screenplays to novels.

Iro Filippaki is a Medical Humanities scholar, focusing on literary representations of physical and mental trauma. After completing her graduate studies at the University of Glasgow, and a postdoctoral research post at Johns Hopkins University, Iro has returned to Athens, Greece where she currently teaches Medical Humanities and other interdisciplinary courses at the American College of Greece. Apart from co-editing Tendon, she is also an editor for De Gruyter’s book series Computer Games and the Humanities. Her monograph published in 2021 was titled The Poetics of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Postmodern Literature, and her current research focuses on representations of injury and resilience, and impatient bodies in literature.

Jessica Leigh Hester is a PhD candidate in History at Johns Hopkins University. Her research examines social and political organizing in response to grave robbings perpetrated by and for medical schools in the nineteenth-century United States. Also a journalist and essayist, her work has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times, New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, and more, and chosen as a notable selection in The Best American Science and Nature Writing. Her first book, Sewer, was published by Bloomsbury. She is now at work on a book about trace fossils, forthcoming with Random House. Jessica received her undergraduate education at the University of Chicago and an MFA in Creative Writing from Hunter College.

Maggie Hart is a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma, where she studies medical rhetoric, rhetoric of the body, embodied research methodologies, and narrative medicine. As a writer, Maggie is a Pushcart Prize nominee and her creative nonfiction has been featured in Narratively, The Audacity, The Blood Project, Mud Season Review, December, and elsewhere. Outside of writing and schoolwork, Maggie enjoys long-distance hiking, running, and traveling.

Alex Parry is an Assistant Professor of Health Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester Medical Center and a historian of public health. His research focuses on injuries, product safety, and child health. He received his M.A. in Literary and Cultural Studies from the University of Oklahoma and his Ph.D. in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine fromJohns Hopkins University. Alex also serves as Coordinator of the interdisciplinary Injury Studies Research Network.

His current research examines the rise of U.S. home accident prevention from the 1920s to 1980s, demonstrating how experts and citizen-consumers combined education, markets for “safe” goods, and product engineering to keep their homes safe. His other projects include work on the cultural representation of injuries, child and toy safety, and infectious disease control. His work has been published in peer-reviewed and public-facing outlets including The Washington Post, Nursing Clio, Technology and Culture, and Isis.

Caitlin Annette Johnson was born in the South and lives in NYC. Their writing has appeared in NonBinary Review, Anodyne, Dunes Review, and others. In addition to their role as Fiction Editor at Tendon, they currently serve as Production Editor for MAYDAY Magazine. When not reading or writing, Johnson hosts free workshops in her community, volunteers as a proud member of NYC-DSA, and tends to a chaotic, creative household complete with a kid, a dog, and an improbable dynasty of potted pothos.

Alexandra Kaul is a writer, anthropologist, and past Tendon contributor. Her research investigates the interplay of memory, ecology, and white supremacy in her native Germany and the Pacific Northwest. Her work has been featured in the Society for Cultural Anthropology’s Fieldsights series and The Georgia Review. She is currently finishing a book-length meditative essay on memory, place, and diaspora, in addition to a second manuscript—an equally weird and deeply researched account of industrial forestry in Oregon. She also serves as a Contributing Editor for the Society for Cultural Anthropology’s online section. She is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Chicago. You can find her work at alexandrakaul.com and find her on Instagram @disquietnarratives.

Zephyr Hameem is a medical student at Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine. She completed her undergraduate education at Saint Louis University in 2021, where she studied Neuroscience and Creative Writing, and later earned her M.S. in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University in 2022. Her works have been published in The Kiln Project and Ripple Magazine. An earnest advocate of exploring creativity in medicine, Zephyr joins the Tendon team with hopes to continue this work and be part of a larger movement to embrace the connections between healthcare and the humanities.