This poem is included in the digital library as part of a partnership between the OHSU Library and the Northwest Narrative Medicine Collaborative to share Narrative Medicine curriculum and the items used in those teaching sessions. For additional information about how the poem is used in teaching and a community driven context, please visit Accessible Narrative Medicine website.

Smith was raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, and later enrolled as a First Wave Urban Arts Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They have written three collections of poetry, have been on Forbes' yearly list of the 30 under 30, and have been awarded a literary grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Don't Call Us Dead, written by Smith and a nominee for the 2017 National Book Award, centers around their identities as a Black, Queer, and HIV Positive person. Additionally, they are a founding member of the diverse, multi-genre Dark Noise Collective. (Source: dsmith.edu)

Whenever you use this item in your own work, please use the citation listed in the Related Work Citation section below.