Yesterday President Barack Obama made headlines by calling for a televised, bi-partisan meeting about the future of health care in this country. As the debate nears, we interviewed an author who works on the front lines of health care.

Today’s guest on the Morning Media Menu was editor and author Danielle Ofri (pictured).

She discussed her new book, “Medicine in Translation“–a literary look at her relationship with her patients at Bellevue Hospital.

She also talked about her work as editor of the Bellevue Literary Review, a journal that features “previously unpublished works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that touch upon relationships to the human body, illness, health and healing.”

Press play on the embedded player below to listen. The show will be archived around the mediabistro.com network all morning.

She offered this advice for writers looking to pitch the journal: “I often recommend letting time pass before you write a creative interpretation [of an event]. I think things need to bake a little bit before you write them. If you’d like to publish a piece of fiction or nonfiction or poetry, it needs to be more than just a recounting of the event. No matter how dramatic an event is, if it’s told in simply a diary style, it doesn’t offer any more than the actual event. What we’re looking for at the Bellevue Literary Review (or anything literary) is something that actually transcends the plot of what happened to reveal some greater truth about what happened… I would recommend reading the Review to see how other people interpret these issues.”