I’m a writer, artist and medical anthropologist. My essays, longform journalism and ethnographic contributions have been published in The Guardian, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, Prospect Magazine, Monocle, The Independent, British Medical Journal, Guernica, Longreads, PEN America, The New Yorker, STAT, American Medical Association Journal of Ethics, Harvard Public Health Magazine, Oral History Review and many others. I’m the co-author of several Lonely Planet travel guidebooks.
British-American since birth, with roots in Scotland and Chicago, I lived for more than ten years in West Africa—between the coastal cities of Monrovia and Dakar, writing in English and French. My essay on Nina Simone’s love for Liberia in the 1970s, published in Guernica, was listed as a notable essay by The New York Times and Longreads and translated into multiple languages including for Éditions du sous-sol.
Alongside artistic work, I have been deeply involved in Ebola preparedness and response for ten years, including during outbreaks in Liberia, D.R. Congo and Uganda. Partnering with community organizers, clinician researchers, psychologists and wider social science teams, we integrate community narratives and survivor oral histories into clinical research, with a view towards democratizing the archive, bringing compassion and deep listening center-stage and making epidemic response policy more inclusive. My work is rooted in my training in infectious diseases, public health, patient accompaniment, narrative therapy, and as a student of oral storytelling traditions.
During the 2014-16 West Africa Ebola outbreak, I was the founding editor of Ebola Deeply, a website that The Guardian called “the antidote to media scaremongering.” My Ebola and global health work has been supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation, University of Oxford, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, Rockefeller Foundation, and Wellcome Trust. I’ve worked with organizations including Partners in Health, Sabin Vaccine Institute, Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Walimu (Uganda), The Atlantic Council and Internews, where I co-created the first medical journalism fellowship program in Liberia.
I co-teach A History of Music as Medicine at Longy School of Music of Bard College with the bassist and artist Tony Leva. I facilitate creative writing, narrative medicine, and spoken word poetry sessions for patients recovering from severe illness, including in Covid-19 field hospitals with Boston Health Care for the Homeless. I have curated art exhibitions with recovered Ebola patients, and partnered with podcasters to explore artistic processes and grief, including on the podcast Out of Grief Comes Art.
I am currently working on two nonfiction books, including a double memoir co-written with my father during the last months of his life, recently excerpted in The Boston Globe Magazine.
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