Submission deadline: November 1, 2026
Writings on health and medicine encompass some of the most pressing concerns of our time—chronic conditions, infectious diseases, obesity, malignancies, reproductive health, mental health, non-medical determinants of health, and health equity. Literary journalists and nonfiction writers have increasingly engaged with these issues, offering perspectives that illuminate what statistics, news headlines, and clinical accounts often cannot. Works such as Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon, Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Sonia Shah’s Pandemic, and Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies demonstrate the urgency, narrative intensity (often marked by detailed characters and scenes, dialogue, and voice), reportorial thoroughness, and broad appeal of recent literary journalism on health and medicine
With an international focus, this edited collection of scholarship aims to gather a global range of contributors to analyze examples or trends within literary journalism and nonfiction on health and medicine, applying innovative critical approaches to assess how, and how effectively, literary nonfiction furthers our understanding of health, illness, care, and the systems that shape them.
Possible sections and subtopics may include—but are not limited to—the following:
Narratives of Illness
–pathographies–as individual expression, as socio-cultural commentary
–the “medicalization” of experience: science versus healing, concepts of balance
–widening conversations of pain, chronic conditions, survivorship
–narratives of patients and practitioners
–crises, pandemics, and health issues across borders
Mental Health and Well-Being
–mental health contextualized in narrative
–self versus society; the limits of psychiatric care; the subjectivity of diagnosis, labels, and treatment
–trauma and trauma narratives
–food, eating, and the body; medical conditions and mental well-being
–gender identity and the politics of gender-affirming care
–intersections of mental health and public health
Medicine and Media
–audience and impact: literary journalism’s effect on medicine, healthcare, and public perceptions
–physicians as reporters and storytellers
–long, nuanced narratives versus medical sensationalism in popular media
–areas of intersection between health humanities and literary journalism
Health Communities, Systems and Strategies
–disparities in access and treatment: race and racism, public health, global health
–the ethics and challenges of care and caretaking
–climate change and the environment
–medicines, drugs, pharmaceutics, pharmacology, addiction
–reproductive healthcare: pregnancy and birth, infertility, menopause, sexual dysfunction
–debates surrounding technology and health
Please send 300-word chapter abstracts with a brief biographical note by November 1, 2026 to the editors: Lisa A. Phillips ([email protected]) and Mileta Roe ([email protected]).
Contributions will be confirmed by January 31, 2027.
Full manuscripts (6000 words) due July 1, 2027.