University of Rochester (2026)
Creative Writing in Healthcare.
Assistant Professor.
Stories abound in healthcare, and the field of narrative medicine encourages patients, families, trainees, and clinicians to tell their stories. Through writing, patients share their perspectives with illness, trainees reflect on their education in healthcare, and clinicians turn to narrative to share insights about their practice. This course applies an attention to narrative to study the craft of creative writing and to practice narrative construction, with a focus on creative nonfiction. Through examination of prose, we will investigate elements that influence narrative composition and efficacy, such as structure and form, voice, tone, and more.
Students will have the opportunity to perform close literary analysis, engage with rigorous study of narrative craft, as well as to apply this knowledge to create and revise their own forms of narrative. This course is designed for individuals interested in health, creative writing, medicine, nursing, public health, medical anthropology, clinical psychology, and other health-related or creative arts fields to gain practice in narrative construction related to health.
Rhodes College (2023)
Narrative Medicine & Health Inequity.
Adjunct Professor.
HLEQ 430 introduces the field of Narrative Medicine and the role of narrative in raising awareness of health inequity. Illness narratives illuminate patient experiences with social determinants of health, and clinician narratives provide insight into healthcare perspectives on inequity. Through a close study of medical narratives, we will delve into systems of health inequality, implicit bias, systemic racism and sexism, narrative ethics, death and dying, mental illness, disability, and more. Students will have the opportunity to engage with narrative medicine theory and discourse as well as to create their own forms of narrative.
This course is designed for individuals interested in health equity, medicine, nursing, public health, medical anthropology, clinical psychology, other health-related fields to gain an interdisciplinary understanding and humanistic perspective of medicine through the lens of narrative.
University of Michigan (2014)
Grand Rounds: Exploring the Literary Symptoms of Illness through Narrative.
Course Instructor.
Doctors have been swearing by the Hippocratic Oath for centuries, recognizing that “there is art to medicine as well as science.” But what exactly does this entail? In this mini- course, we will immerse ourselves within the art of medicine by entering into the realm of illness narratives. How do the worlds of Literature and Medicine intertwine? This literary perspective will illuminate the experience of illness from outside the scope of science. While paying particular attention to literary genres that express the illness experience from outside the scope of science, we will also explore multiple modalities of expressing illness in music, art, and dance.
In medical education, health practitioners embark on medical rounds by discussing individual patient cases at their bedsides. This course will be structured in parallel to this approach; each week, we will explore a different aspect of medicine through the lens of a different literary genre. Through literary theory, novels, short stories, poetry, memoir, and children’s literature, we will explore abstract illness, mental illnesses like depression, physical illnesses like the locked-in syndrome, disabilities like autism, cancer, and terminal illness.