Huntsville Literary Association president embraces love of art, poetry

HUNTSVILLE, Alabama -- Dr. Monita Soni grew up in a home full of books and art, with a mother who painted and a father who held poetry sessions. Her aunt, an English literature teacher, gave a fourth-grade Monita an unabridged collection of William Shakespeare’s work.
It’s no surprise that Soni lives in a home full of colorful art she has painted and surrounded by books she loves. She sits up in bed and writes poems about life, love, relationships, the seasons and anything that floats through her mind.
Soni has found the company of others for whom the arts are a passion in the Huntsville Literary Association. She is the president of the organization that promotes the literary arts through writing contests and workshops, book chats and the publication of “POEM,” the group’s literary magazine.
The HLA also sponsors visiting authors for Sunday Salons and public talks as well as this week’s American Shakespeare Center on Tour’s presentation of two of Shakespeare’s plays.
“I’m enjoying life, every bit of it, and I find that in HLA,” Soni said recently at her home in Madison.
“I want to be around people for whom these things matter, where word play matters, where music matters, where art matters,” Soni said, her elegant hands sweeping through the air, emphasizing her words.
Soni grew up in Mumbai, India, formerly known as Bombay, and her mother is from the architecturally rich city of Jaipur, the capital of the Indian state of Rajasthan. She originally wanted to study art and architecture and literature, but her father encouraged her to take advantage of her high scores in science and pursue medicine. With a medical degree, he told her, she could live anywhere she wanted, Soni said.
After studying medicine in Mumbai, Soni did her residency in the largest cancer hospital in India. She came to America in 1992 and has worked at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center; Cornell, Vanderbilt and Baylor universities; and M.D. Anderson Cancer Center before opening her own pathology lab, PrimePath, 13 years ago.
Soni’s specialty is in lymphoma and leukemia and she works closely with oncologists and surgeons who deliver the diagnoses she gives. She reflects on the news the patients will get as she looks through the microscope, and those thoughts often find their way into her poems.
She writes some of her poetry driving between her home in Madison and her office in Decatur, often rushing in to write down her thoughts before getting started on her day.
“I love poetry,” Soni said. “The verbs constantly seem to float in my head. Words get stuck in my head.”
She is influenced in her poetry by the works of Rabindranath Tagore, the first non-European to earn the Nobel Prize in Literature, Robert Frost and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, among others. Her family is often the subject of her own work, and she has written poems about her daughter, the birth of her grandson and a bad fall her father had in the middle of the night when no one heard his calls for help.
“I write for myself,” Soni said. “You have to write about your life, your time, because that’s what carries. One of her favorites quotations is by George Bernard Shaw: “For our writing to be timeless, we have to truthfully write about our time."