Lise Saffran studied public health at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and fiction writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow. Having begun a career in public health out of a commitment to reproductive health and rights, she has at various times been a community health educator, the coordinator of a program to prevent farm injuries, a community activist and the Director of the Master of Public Health Program at the University of Missouri. She is now a Continuing Lecturer at the School of Public Health, UC Berkeley and an internationally recognized consultant who teaches creative nonfiction to medical and public health professionals. Global health is a long-standing interest; she assisted with a family planning research project in Sri Lanka as a trainee and as a teacher has led several study abroad courses in public and community health in Ghana, West Africa.
Lise’s published fiction includes the novel JUNO’S DAUGHTERS (Penguin/Plume 2011) and short stories in a variety of literary magazines. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Hedgebrook Community of writers and her nonfiction has been published in both academic and literary journals, including The Lancet, PLOS One, Academic Medicine, Medical Humanities, Poets and Writers, Orion and On the Issues. Her research interests include the impact of fiction writing on health professions education and perceptions of social and contextual influences on health behavior.
Some recent publications by Lise Saffran
An essay in the Lancet on art and education around global health and climate change
A public health humanities critique of the framing of Covid stories in the popular press
A paper on using guided fiction writing to teach cultural competency in the Journal of Medical Humanities
An essay on love, desire and fear in HIV education in Academic Medicine
A Scientific American Guest Blog post on finding truth through storytelling
A Scientific American Guest Blog post on Togo, Missouri and everything in between
Teaching public health in the midst of loosening gun laws, in the Chronicle of Higher Education