Narrative Acts / Community Action

Join us for a new narrative medicine virtual series to engage with our alumni, faculty and the global community as we explore through their work ways the humanities and creative arts are an actionable path toward community-centered change and responding to difficult times.

For this inaugural Narrative Acts/Community Action event, we will be joined by two distinguished narrative medicine faculty who will share their work and experience with the community. Together we seek to find inspiration in the humanities and creative arts as individual and collective means to help navigate uncertain times through self-reflection and processing, advocacy and visibility, and connection with others. 

Dr. Sayantani DasGupta is a founder and faculty member in the MS in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University, and also teaches in two undergraduate centers at Columbia: the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society and The Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. She is the author, co-author, or editor of several academic books including Principles and Practices of Narrative Medicine as well as Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write their Bodies. She also a New York Times bestselling author of fiction for young people, including the critically acclaimed, Bengali folktale and string theory-inspired Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond books, the first of which—The Serpent’s Secret—was a Bank Street Best Book of the Year, a Booklist Best Middle Grade Novel of the 21st Century, and an E.B. White Read Aloud Honor Book. She is also the author of two other middle grade fantasy series, the Fire Queen series and Secrets of the Sky Series, as well as She Persisted: Virginia Apgar, and two Jane Austen inspired contemporary novels, Debating Darcy and Rosewood: A Midsummer Meet Cute. She is a founding member of Authors Against Book Bans, for whom she wrote a recent op-ed connecting the work of narrative medicine, literacy and fighting book banning: https://time.com/7094430/book-banning-health-consequences/Find out more about her work at www.sayantanidasgupta.com 

Jenessa Abrams is a writer of literary criticism, culinary arts, fiction, literary translation, and a practitioner of narrative medicine. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, BOMB Magazine, The New York Times, and anthologies including Off Assignment’s Letter to a Stranger (Algonquin, 2022). She has been awarded fellowships and grants from the National Book Critics Circle, MacDowell, The New York Public Library, the Ucross Foundation, the Norman Mailer Center, the Vermont Studio Center, and Columbia University, where she earned her MFA in fiction and literary translation and her MS in Narrative Medicine. Abrams has taught writing across academic and community spaces including the Mount Sinai Adolescent Health Center, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Rutgers University, Sarah Lawrence College Writing Institute, and Columbia University, where she currently teaches in the M.S. Narrative Medicine Program. Her writing focuses on reproductive justice, mental illness, and relationships of caregiving. Abrams serves on the Board of Directors of New Neighbors Partnership, a New York-based non-profit that helps newly arrived refugees connect to local community resources.

Narrative Acts/Community Action will be a recurring event hosted by the Division of Narrative Medicine in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Narrative Acts/Community Actions is supported by live captioning. If you have any other accessibility needs or concerns, please contact the Office of Disability Services at 212-854-2388 or disability@columbia.edu at least 10 days in advance of the event. We do our best to arrange accommodations received after this deadline but cannot guarantee them.