Bringing together poets, artists, and health scholars to discuss issues of justice and equity as it relates to race, class, gender, and sexual orientation in observance of National Minority Health Month and National Poetry Month.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Health Equity and Jason Mendez, Block Chronicles.   The forum will be live-streamed on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/CenterofHealthEquityPitt

Speakers and Poets: 

Joseph Capehart
Mateo Perez Lara
Tameka Cage Conley
Ryan Petteway 
LeConté Dill 

Bios:

Dr. Tameka Cage Conley  is a graduate of the fiction program of the Iowa Writers' Workshop where she was awarded the Truman Capote Fellowship and the Provost Postgraduate Visiting Writer Fellowship in Fiction. Her work is published in Ploughshares, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Callaloo, The African American Review and elsewhere. She has received writing fellowships from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Cave Canem Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and the Vermont Studio Center. The opera for which she wrote the libretto, A Gathering of Sons, was awarded the Bronze Medal in the Society and Social Issues category of the New York Festivals TV and Film Awards. She is at work on her first novel, You, Your Father--an epic family saga that considers the untimely deaths of African American men over six decades beginning in the early 1940s in northern Louisiana. An excerpt of the novel is forthcoming in the Spring 2021 edition of The Iowa Review. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Oxford College of Emory University. 

Dr. LeConté Dill is a native of South Central Los Angeles and is currently creating a homeplace in Bed-Stuy Brooklyn. She is a community-accountable scholar, educator, and poet. Dr. Dill holds degrees from Spelman College, the University of California Los Angeles, and the University of California Berkeley. Guided by Black Feminist epistemologies and using qualitative and arts-based research methods, she has a commitment toward transdisciplinary research. Dr. Dill listens to and shows up for urban Black girls and other youth of color and works to rigorously document their experiences of violence, safety, resistance, and wellness. Currently, she is the Director of Public Health Practice and a Clinical Associate Professor at New York University. Additionally, since 2015, she has been a Research Associate at the African Centre for Migration & Society at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Dr. Ryan J. Petteway is a social epidemiologist and assistant professor in the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health. His applied research integrates social epidemiology, critical theory, decolonizing methods, and CBPR/YPAR to examine notions of place, embodiment, and “placemaking” in community health. More broadly, his scholarship engages: 1) notions of epistemic, procedural, and distributive justice within public health knowledge production, and 2) applications of critical theory to examine dominant discourse/narrative frames of “health equity”. Dr. Petteway is also an award-winning poet. His poem “TOGETHER//Untethered”, was awarded an April 2020 National Poetry Month Prize—and nominated for the 2021 Pushcart Prize. His poem, “LATENT//Missing”, was published by Health Education & Behavior in August 2020, representing the first poem published within a major public health journal as an expression of public health science/scholarship. The piece was recently honored with their 2020 Lawrence W. Green Paper of the Year Award.

Mateo Perez Lara is a queer, non-binary, Latinx poet from California. They received their M.F.A. in Poetry as part of the first cohort to graduate from Randolph College’s Creative Writing Program. They have a chapbook, Glitter Gods, published with Thirty West Publishing House. As a queer, latinx person, they hope to elevate not only their voice but the voice/s of the communities in which they are from and hold solidarity for.

Joseph Capehart is a nationally acclaimed poet, speaker, host, educator, and community organizer. Liberian by way of Minneapolis, MN, they hold an MFA in
Poetry from Randolph College. Joseph's work appears in multiple print publications and their poetry videos have been featured across the internet with Button Poetry and MTV, among others. They currently live in Brooklyn, NY where they serve as a 7th grade Reading Teacher.