Abraham Verghese attended the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1990, where he obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree. At the time he had taken a sabbatical from an active AIDS practice. His first book, My Own Country, about AIDS in rural Tennessee, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for 1994 and was made into a movie. His second book, The Tennis Partner, was a New York Times Notable Book and a national bestseller. He has published extensively in the medical literature, and his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, The Atlantic, Esquire, Granta, The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere.