International Health Humanities Network Membership

Artist/Faculty Bio: I am Associate Professor in the University of Washington School of Nursing, Seattle; Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies; and Affiliate Faculty in the UW Certificate Program in Public Scholarship. I teach health policy, community/public health, and narrative medicine/health humanities courses. Since 1986, I have worked as a nurse practitioner providing community-based primary health care to homeless and refugee populations on both coasts of the United States. The focus of my career has been to increase an understanding of the lives of marginalized populations, and to improve their access to effective health care.

My scholarship is community and practice-based, applied to real world 'wicked' problems of homelessness, gender-based violence, and access to health care. My essays have appeared in The Sun, The Oberlin Alumni Magazine, Pulse: Voices From the Heart of Medicine, Silk Road, The Intima, The Examined Life Journal, Johns Hopkins Public Health Magazine, and in the anthology I Wasn't Strong Like This When I Started Out: True Stories of Becoming a Nurse, edited by Lee Gutkind. I write a blog, Medical Margins, on health policy and nursing. My debut medical memoir, Catching Homelessness: A Nurse's Story of Falling Through the Safety Net (Berkely: She Writes Press, 2016) has been chosen to be the University of Washington Health Sciences Common Book for AY 2016/17. 

Through my writing and photography I engage in critiques of current social justice issues such as poverty and homelessness, trauma and resilience, and the wellbeing of marginalized populations. As a nurse and academic with the lived experience of homelessness, my writing and photography are ways to explore possible answers to complex ethical and existential questions. My aim is to humanize health care, to cultivate empathy leading to action.