Louise Aronson, a leading geriatrician and UCSF professor of medicine is the author of the New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, and Reimagining Life and the story collection, A History of the Present Illness, a finalist for the 2014 PEN Bingham award. She is a graduate of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and Harvard Medical School.
She has been awarded the Sonora Review Prize, New Millennium Writing Award, and fellowships from Hedgebrook, Ragdale and Ucross, as well as multiple awards for teaching, mentorship, and humanism in medicine. Her writing credits include the New York Times, the Atlantic, Narrative Magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, Lancet, Washington Post, JAMA, and the New England Journal of Medicine. Her work in aging has been featured on NPR, NBC, CBS, and the New Yorker. Her most recent published article was "The Conversations Trump's Doctors Should be Having with Him" in The Atlantic and she was the 2025 commencement speaker at the UCSF School of Medicine.
While at MacDowell in 2018, she made transformative progress on her first full-length work of non-fiction, Elderhood. During her 2025 residency, Aronson worked on her next book, a creative non-fiction memoir about the medicalization and lived experience of infertility/donor conception and aging/longevity. She also made progress on a related visual art collage book that tells the DNA surprise story via panels of curated and curiously juxtaposed text and images.
