Echocardiographer by Day, Poet by Night 

Transitioning from a career as a creative writing college instructor to an echocardiographer, Paul Hlava Ceballos took full advantage of Bellevue College’s offerings in the Diagnostic Ultrasound program.  

“I was looking for a new career …,” Hlava Ceballos said. Drawn to the healthcare field, he found diagnostic medical sonography. “Bellevue College not only had the best equipment, they offered more scanning time.” 

Today, he is a cardiac sonographer at the UW Medicine Heart Institute.  

“I work in the lab, with patients coming for visits, or run up to the hospital and do ultrasound scans at patients’ bedsides,” Hlava Ceballos said, noting he graduated from Bellevue College in 2019. “I’ll do about five a day. Ultrasounds include 45 minutes to an hour with the patient. Everything from measuring their blood pressure to the velocity of their valves.” 

For Hlava Ceballos, taking ultrasounds of people’s hearts is “really an art form as well as a craft.” 

“Our job is about discovery, not just getting an image but also spending enough time with the heart to understand its function,” he said. “Ultimately, it’s returning to the cardiologist with a clear story of the patient’s pathology laid out. A lot of times, we don’t know what is going on at first. A patient comes in with shortness of breath, and we have to figure it out.” 

He finds numerical data fascinating and enjoys spending time with the patients.  

“There’s some patients that I might scan daily,” he said. “Maybe I’ll see them annually because of their needs. It’s really cool to be able to form that connection with them. It’s a wonderful opportunity to talk to them and help. All I want to say of my job is that I can help someone. At the best of times, I can help someone live by finding something like a valve issue and then seeing them after that valve is replaced.” 

He did face some challenges in making the switch from teaching creative writing to working in the medical field.  

“I was a little older than other students,” said Hlava Ceballos, who entered Bellevue College in his mid-30s. “In some ways, I was more prepared than I ever had been to be a student. But I knew absolutely nothing about cardiac function. It was very enlightening.” 

To orientate himself on how hospitals work, he volunteered at a long-term care facility. He felt that helped pinpoint what he wanted to do.  

“I thought it was incredibly useful,” he said. “I also wrote various hospitals and job shadowed various fields. Which was also helpful in figuring out where I wanted to go.” 

His favorite classes at Bellevue were the labs.  

“Getting to use the equipment was always fascinating. Pathology was very fun, getting to see the pictures and the scenarios,” he recalled. 

Switching from teaching to echocardiography hasn’t hurt Hlava Ceballos’ poetry career, however.  

In 2023, his work “banana [ ]” (University of Pittsburgh Press) was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award—and received the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Donald Hall Prize for Poetry in 2021, the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award in 2023, and was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award in 2024. Besides feeling great about the work’s reception, Hlava Ceballos continues to create while working full-time. 

“Poetry was something that I’ve been working on for several decades and what I have my MFA in. One of the wonderful things about going back to school at Bellevue, I had a little bit more control of my time. I was working on a book at the time,” he said. 

Hlava Ceballos does “documentary poetics.” He uses source documents to create his works, culling words and lines out of unlikely sources to create his poems. For “banana [ ],” he found text from 296 sources, including declassified CIA documents, botanical documents from 1700s, and history books to build his meditation on the highly political nature of banana cultivation in Central America.  

“It’s piecing together a history of Latin America through bananas in an emotional way,” he said. 

This style of poetry built on his interest in analyzing data.  

“Through collage, I could show this information about bananas, the massacres that happened on banana farms, was already there. But also to make people feel it as well as know it, so it could live a little longer,” he said. “History is such a contested thing right now. This is an important way for a lot of groups of threatened or oppressed people to keep our histories alive.” 

 “Thankfully, working in the medical field allows for a more flexible schedule, so I can keep writing. I can work a four-day work week—four 10-hour days—and that’s wonderful for childcare, too,” said the poet and father of a toddler.  

He’s also planning to do more with the youngest heart patients. “I am interested in taking my pediatric boards,” said Hlava Ceballos. “That’s the next step for my career.”