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 bring about societal changes. Novels, essays, poetry, fine art, architecture and music have all brought about change and influenced lives.
Some public health professionals are using poetry to shift narratives, express feelings and change opinions.
Health and poetry are two things that are not often combined, but can assist public health when used together, according to Ryan Petteway, DrPH, MPH, an associate professor at the Oregon Health and Science University-Portland State University School of Public Health
“I'm a social epidemiologist by training, but I was a poet before I could even pronounce the word ‘epidemiologist,'” he said during a session at APHA's 2025 Annual Meeting and Expo in November. “This body of work that we all kind of inherited when we stepped into our public health training excluded all of this.”
Petteway has had his works published in a range of public health journals and publications. His “Upon the Body” collection is centered around being a Black epidemiologist during COVID-19.
“It's a cold, Cold World, but it's hot in the Sunshine; got N-95 problems — who they got on the frontlines?” he asks in one his poems.
Poetry can be used to create “healthful narratives,” according to Shanaé Burch, EdD, EdM, who serves on the editorial board of the Society for Public Health Education's Health Promotion Practice journal.
In 2021, Burch and her colleagues began publishing health-related poetry in journals. The poems served as a therapeutic outlet for authors and a mirror for readers to examine their own attitudes and ideas about the intersection of art and public health. Creating healthful narratives “begins with naming where it truly hurts, because if you take the time to acknowledge where it hurts, we can then hold space for what else can be,” Burch said. “We have to think about reimagining what it even 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 APHA Press book was published 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 actually embody what anti-racism means?,” Griffith said. “How do you think about what that is, and how do we actually create that sort of vision? The arts were a natural, fundamental part of that to both of us.”
At a poetry workshop during APHA 2025, participants shared poems on topics such as womanhood, the impact of police brutality and the fallout from the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Petteway shared a work about the environmental health effects of the 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.
Attendee Mikayla Hyland, MA, a board member for Lorain County Public Health Ohio, said she does not shy away from being proactive in poetry.
Participants at an APHA 2025 poetry workshop shared work on environmental issues, police brutality and other topics.
Photo by EZ Event Photography
“I have always had a lot of strong emotions,” Hyland, MA, told The Nation's Health. “As an adult, I've channeled that into more political poetry.”
Mary Lisa Penilla, a research program manager at Pennsylvania State University, said she typically writes about her life and observations.
“It's how I make sense of the world,” Penilla told The Nation's Health.
For more of Petteway's poetry, visit www.rjpetteway.com.
- Copyright The Nation’s Health, American Public Health Association
