APHA 2025 participants interact during a session on poetry and public health in November.
Photo by EZ Event Photography
History has shown how art can help achieve social change. Novels, essays, poetry, fine arts, architecture, and music have changed and influenced lives.
Some public health professionals are using poetry to change narratives, express feelings, and change opinions.
Health and poetry are two things that are not often combined, but can help public health when used together, according to Ryan Petteway, DrPH, MPH, associate professor at the School of Public Health at Oregon Health and Sciences University-Portland State University.
“I’m a social epidemiologist by training, but I was a poet before I could even say the word ‘epidemiologist,’” he said during a session at APHA’s 2025 Annual Meeting and Exposition in November. “This set of jobs that we all inherited when we started our public health training excluded all of this.”
Petteway has published his work in a variety of journals and public health publications. His collection “Upon the Body” focuses on being a Black epidemiologist during COVID-19.
“It’s a cold, cold world, but it’s hot under the sun; we have problems with the N-95, who do they have on the front line?” he asks in one of his poems.
Poetry can be used to create “healthy narratives,” according to Shanaé Burch, EdD, EdM, editorial board member of the Society for Public Health Education. Health promotion practice diary.
In 2021, Burch and his colleagues began publishing health-related poetry in magazines. The poems served as a therapeutic outlet for the authors and a mirror for readers to examine their own attitudes and ideas about the intersection of art and public health. Creating healthy narratives “starts with naming where it really hurts, because if you take the time to recognize where it hurts, then we can make room for what else can be,” Burch said. “We have to think about reimagining what it means to be a community.”
Other public health experts who have embraced poetry include Chandra Ford, PhD, MPH, MLIDS, and Derek Griffith, PhD, MA, co-editors of “Racism: Science and Tools for the Public Health Professional.”
After the first edition of the book was published by APHA Press a few years ago, they began thinking about other ways to express the impact of racism besides prose. The latest edition published last year includes poems and stories from people who have experienced racism in daily life.
“How do you really embody what anti-racism means?” Griffith said. “How do you think about what that is and how do we actually create that kind of vision? The arts were a natural and fundamental part of that for both of us.”
In a poetry workshop during APHA 2025, participants shared poems on topics such as womanhood, the impact of police brutality, and the consequences of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Petteway shared work on the environmental health effects of the 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.
Attendee Mikayla Hyland, MA, board member of Lorain County, Ohio Public Health, said she doesn’t shy away from being proactive in poetry.
Participants in an APHA 2025 poetry workshop shared work on environmental issues, police brutality and other topics.
Photo by EZ Event Photography
“I’ve always had a lot of strong emotions,” said Hyland, MA. The health of the nation. “As an adult, I’ve channeled it into more political poetry.”
Mary Lisa Penilla, director of research programs at Pennsylvania State University, said she typically writes about her life and observations.
“That’s how I make sense of the world,” Penilla said. The health of the nation.
For more information on Petteway’s poetry, visit www.rjpetteway.com.
- Copyright The Nation’s Health, American Public Health Association
