Michele G. Kunz

From the ICU to the classroom to the page

Michele’s nursing journey began at Eger Nursing Home on Staten Island, where she worked her way from Nurse’s Aide to LPN to RN between 1974 and 1980. In 1980, during a critical nursing shortage in New York City, she was hired at Staten Island University Hospital and placed directly in the Intensive Care Unit — an environment where every moment counts. The learning curve was steep, and she rose to it by teaching: mentoring her colleagues in real time, deepening her own skills as she strengthened theirs.

In 1984 she became a Staff Development Instructor in the Nursing Education Department at Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn, where for the first time her official job was to teach hundreds of nurses — including American Heart Association certification classes in ACLS, BLS, and PALS for the entire hospital staff. By 1997 she was promoted to Director of Nursing Education and Research, a role she held until 2009, when she moved to Mercy Medical Center on Long Island as their Director of Nursing Education and Research.

Alongside her hospital career, Michele and her husband Joseph built their own training company — and their own study materials, because the user-friendly resources their students needed simply didn’t exist. Their classes spread across Brooklyn, Queens, Nassau, and Suffolk, and by 2007 they were training the medical staff of hundreds of hospitals, medical offices, and surgicenters, plus a military base and several colleges. In 2003, they founded Dickson Keanaghan to publish those study guides for a worldwide audience.

After 44 years of hospital service, Michele has transitioned to full-time teaching and writing. Her library now spans ten titles — certification exam guides, class-prep workbooks, the Zombie Notes study charts, the Mindful Nursing series, and an annotated edition of Florence Nightingale’s Notes on Nursing — every one of them created, in her words, “to support the nurses who support everyone else.”