Ryan Petteway, associate professor at the Oregon Health & Science University-Portland State University School of Public Health, used to see his passion for poetry and his career as a social epidemiologist as separate. In 2020, the pandemic helped him realize he could — and actually had to — integrate the two to be true to himself. Since then, he’s been encouraging others to see poetry as a valid and necessary form of public health scholarship. An event celebrating the intersection of poetry and public health, Stats and Stanzas, will take place May 5, and everyone's invited.
As long as he can remember, Petteway has always had a love for poetry and music. He began writing poetry at 11, participated in freestyle battles and poetry slams, created mixtapes and submitted poems to literary journals. But after he earned his Master’s in Public Health at the University of Michigan, he put his interest in poetry and music on pause.
Ryan Petteway (photo courtesy of Petteway)“I literally didn't write a poem for reading or performing or submitting for a decade,” he says. “I felt like I didn’t really have any time to be in a creative space.” The one exception was when he formatted his doctoral dissertation as a mixtape and wrote his acknowledgements as a poem. Then he got busy with work again, and poetry once again fell to the wayside.
Enter the pandemic. A time when Petteway, now a professor at OHSU-PSU School of Public Health studying the structural roots of health inequalities, was forced to pause and reflect. This time for reflection led to an epiphany: instead of a distraction from his research, poetry could actually be another form of public health scholarship.
“This is how I see the world, this is how I make sense out of the world, by thinking through writing, and so there is no reason that I can’t reconcile that with research,” he says. “For me there’s no difference between running a regression and writing a poem.”
Petteway also appreciates poetry’s ability to inspire and activate community via emotional connection. This means that poetry may be able to energize people to take action on social and political issues, including public health policy, something that traditional research often fails to accomplish. As an example of this lack of progress, he found in a literature search that almost 250,000 publications about Black maternal and child health have been published since 1985, and yet maternal mortality and infant mortality inequities between Black women and white women haven’t changed.
“We dehumanize conversations about health equity, and poetry is a chance to humanize that, to remember that we're full humans, that we feel things,” he says. “Every social, political movement of consequence for public health in the United States of America has always had arts behind it, every single one of them.”
Poetry in practice
Over the past three years, Petteway has been committed to making the case for why integrating poetry into public health research and education is so vitally important. This started with Petteway submitting a paper containing a poem to Health Education & Behavior, a top public health journal. When it was accepted and later won paper of the year, Petteway knew he was on to something. A second paper of his that argued that integrating poetry and public health is a decolonizing, anti-racist practice that centers the voices of traditionally marginalized people was soon published in a different journal. That paper also won paper of the year.
“This was significant because it allowed me to take up space and bring a new conversation forward,” he says. ”It’s clear that folks find value in it. Now I have this opportunity to open the door as much as possible.”
Petteway has been opening that door in a variety of ways. He is now co-leading the first standing peer-reviewed poetry section in a public health journal, Health Promotion Practice, and people outside the traditional power structures of academia are encouraged to submit their poems. An upcoming issue will include a poem by a 14-year-old.
“A 14-year-old can tell a compelling story that lands and moves the needle forward in terms of how we feel about health and social inequalities,” he says. “We don't necessarily need some researcher that is 55 years old with a Ph.D. and a $10 million grant to interview that 14-year-old and then take that data and publish what the 14-year-old said. The 14-year-old can tell their own story. They’re the researcher. They’re the scholar.”
Petteway has also integrated poetry and music into the classes that he teaches. For the final assignment in his undergraduate course, Gender, Race, Class, and Health, he asks his students to submit a Public Health Mixtape that analyzes how 10 songs connect to topics covered in the course, including racism, sexism, and heterosexism. In his Community Organizing for Health course, students select songs that could serve as the soundtrack to their proposed organizing topic—”movement music” to spark social and political action for health. In a new class taught last term, Decolonizing Public Health Research, students were asked to find a research article and poem on the same health topic and compare and contrast the approaches.
His work is spreading beyond the university, too. As part of an anti-racism faculty fellowship that Petteway was awarded through the School of Public Health, he has continued to develop the youth health equity and action research training (yHEART) program, which trains low-income youth and youth of color living in North/Northeast Portland to be public health researchers and to transform their public health data into creative arts products.
Youth participating in SEI poetry workshop last summer (photo courtesy of Petteway)With the nonprofits Self Enhancement Inc. (SEI) and the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon (APANO), Petteway also facilitates a series of poetry competitions and workshops for Black and Asian and Pacific Islander youth.
On May 5, some of these youth poets—along with Petteway—will be sharing their work at Stats and Stanzas, an event co-hosted by the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health, SEI and APANO. There will be a poetry competition, Filipino and Belizean food and a guest DJ spinning tracks from the Public Health Mixtapes. The event will be held from 6-9 pm at the Joseph R. Robertson Collaborative Life Sciences Building. Stats and Stanzas is free, family-friendly, and the public is invited to attend.
Petteway says, instead of focusing on health deficits and vulnerabilities, this will be a space where people can tell their own stories and “lean into this idea of poetry as healing and resistance.”
He hopes Stats and Stanzas will be the first of an annual series that celebrates the intersection of public health and poetry.