D5.01 - Skill-building Workshop: Dreaming Poetic Health Justice: Writing, Reading, & Teaching Poetry for the Public’s Health

Presenter: Ryan J. Petteway, DrPH, MPH – Associate Professor, OHSU-PSU School of Public Health; Presenter: Shanaé Burch, EdD, EdM – Public Health Scholar, Creating Healthful Narratives, LLC; Author: Henneh Kwaku Kyereh, CHES, MA, MFA – PhD Student, Chapman University; Author: LaNita Wright, PhD, MPH, MCHES – Associate Professor, Program Director of Public Health, Kennesaw State University

Brief Abstract Summary: Public health education has yet to tap the full potential and power of poetry within pedagogy, practice, and research for health justice. This two-part interactive poetry writing, reading, and pedagogical training session draws from critical, Black feminist, antiracist, and decolonial theory to guide attendees through a series of poetry writing, reflection, and co-creation activities designed to nurture deeper awareness of and connection to poetry as a mode of public health knowledge production and exchange. These activities will provide a theoretically rich and classroom-practicable scaffolding upon which attendees can build deeper poetic engagements into their teaching, practice, and research, and will result in the development of individual poetic works and a collective draft “Poetry for the Public Health’s” syllabus. Attendees should bring pen and paper and be ready for collective and generative poetic play. A device with internet connection is highly recommended. And a snack.

Detailed abstract description: Creative arts, including poetry, are instrumental to community health, wellbeing, and healing. Every social movement of health consequence has been backed by songs, poems, and dance to codify resistance, galvanize community, inspire imagination, and testify for more just futures. For those of us “at the margins,” creative modes of expression have always been critical to our learning and survival. For us, “poetry is not a luxury” (Lorde). However, public health education has yet to tap the full potential and power of poetry within pedagogy, practice, and research for health justice.

In this two-part interactive poetry writing, reading, and pedagogical training session, we draw from critical, Black feminist, antiracist, and decolonial theory to guide attendees through a series of poetry writing, reflection, and co-creation activities designed to nurture deeper awareness of and connection to poetry as a mode of public health knowledge production and exchange. Through engaging poetry as praxis, we’ll explore the epistemological, ethical, and material imperative of remixing/reimagining public health knowledge production, expression, and curation practices to more fully—and unapologetically—"center the margins,” with poetry a necessary format of health equity discourse for healing, resistance, and solidarity. In doing so, we invite attendees to dream with us in articulating a vision of creative public health praxis capable of doing our stories and embodied knowledges (poetic health) justice.

In Session 1, attendees will engage core conceptual foundations for centering creative ways of knowing within public health education, and engage in collective and generative poetic play through world writing/making activities – through which they will develop drafts of their own poems. Session 2 will build upon Session 1, and attendees will continue conceptual engagements to collectively develop a draft model syllabus for teaching a “Poetry for the Public’s Health” course. They will also have an opportunity to “workshop” and share their poem drafts from Session 1. Attendees should bring pen and paper and be ready for collective and generative poetic play. A device with internet connection is highly recommended. And a snack.