Vincent M. Riccardi
Vincent M. Riccardi was born in 1940 in Brooklyn, New York. In late 1947, his family moved to Southern California. He went to UCLA, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in zoology, and had a very strong attachment to the linguistic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. He graduated in Georgetown University Medical School on June 6, 1966. He did his internship and residency in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he met his wife, Susan (an element of many of the poems), a nurse in the Veteran’s Administration Hospital. They had met in February 1967 and were married in July 1967. His genetics fellowship was at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Hospital. He was a major in the U.S. Army Medical Corps from July 1970 to the end of 1971. His academic faculty career took him to Denver, Colorado; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and Houston, Texas. In Houston in 1981, he founded and directed the Neurofibromatosis Institute. In June 1990, they moved to La Crescenta, California, and he was the director of a chromosome analysis laboratory. At the end of his contract, he obtained an MBA and founded American Medical Consumers. He gave up his medical license in 2015. Vincent started writing these poems in medical school and continued composing them at present.