AUTHOR ROSALIENE BACCHUS


Reaching minds and hearts through storytelling



POEM "DISEASE IS NOT THE ONLY THING THAT SPREADS" BY BRITISH AMERICAN POET SEEMA YASMIN



SEEMA YASMIN is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, medical doctor, professor, and author. Born in 1982 in Warwickshire, England, she was raised in East London by her immigrant Muslim family of Indian and Burmese ancestry. She trained in biochemistry at Queen Mary University of London where she graduated in 2005. She moved to the University of Cambridge to complete a graduate program in medicine.


Yasmin started her medical career in the UK National Health Service (NHS), where she worked for a year at the Homerton University Hospital. She moved to the United States in 2010, after receiving a fellowship from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The following year, she joined the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as an officer in the Epidemic Intelligence Service, investigating outbreaks in prisons, hospitals, reservations, and other settings. While studying an outbreak of flesh-eating bacteria on the Navajo Nation, she realized the journalistic power of effective science communication for shifting public policy.


In 2013, Yasmin received a Dalla Lana Fellowship in Journalism & Health Impact at the University of Toronto. She focused on telling the stories of epidemics to encourage others to learn from tragedy. Upon completing her fellowship, she joined The Dallas Morning News in Texas, as a reporter covering epidemics of Zika and Ebola, as well as public health crises of racism, gun violence, and gender violence.


She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in breaking news in 2017 with a team from The Dallas Morning News for coverage of a mass shooting. She has also received two awards from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Her reporting appears in Rolling Stone, The New York Times, WIRED, Scientific American, and other outlets.


Yasmin joined Stanford University, California, as a John S. Knight Fellow in Journalism in 2017, investigating the spread of misinformation and pseudoscience during epidemics. In 2019, she was appointed as Director of the Stanford University of Health Communication Initiative and clinical assistant professor of medicine at Stanford University.


Yasmin is also a fiction fellow of the Kundiman and Tin House writing workshops. Her poems and short stories have been published in literary magazines and anthologies. If God Is A Virus, published in 2021, is her first book of poetry. Other publications include:

  • Unbecoming: A Novel (2024)
  • The ABCs of Queer History (2024)
  • Djinnology: An Illuminated Compendium of Spirits and Stories from the Muslim World (2024)
  • What the Fact?: Finding the Truth in All the Noise (2022)
  • Viral BS: Medical Myths and Why We Fall for Them (2021)
  • Muslim Women Are Everything: Stereotype-Shattering Stories of Courage, Inspiration, and Adventure (2020) and
  • The Impatient Dr. Lange: One Man’s Fight to End the Global HIV Epidemic (2018)

Her scholarly work focuses on the spread of health misinformation and disinformation, the growth of medical and news deserts, and the impact on public health. She teaches creative nonfiction including health and science journalism, global health storytelling, practicing medicine with empathy and compassion, and advanced clinical communication skills.


Photo of Seema Yasmin by Lucas Passmore, published on her official website at seemayasmin.com.


PREFACE FROM POETRY COLLECTION IF GOD IS A VIRUS BY SEEMA YASMIN



In the spring of 2014, a mysterious disease spread through a village in Guinea close to the borders of Liberia and Sierra Leone. Three dozen people were infected. Many of them died. By the time the infection was identified, the Ebola virus had spread to Liberia and was on its way to Sierra Leone, Nigeria, England, and the United States. The virus crossed borders and the wet linings of mouths, nostrils, and eyes, incapacitating white blood cells and turning blood vessels leaky. Over the next two years, 30,000 people were infected in the biggest Ebola epidemic in history. More than 12,000 people died. An estimated 20,000 survivors of Ebola disease continue to battle chronic illness and stigma



POEM "DISEASE IS NOT THE ONLY THING THAT SPREADS" BY SEEMA YASMIN



What else is contagious: Ellen's long tongue.

A rumor we buried daddy in an unmarked

grave. History. Pathogens criss-crossing agar

-plated petri dishes like rebel soldiers breaching

trenches. This story: that we had it coming,

that we are good only for uncivil wars and dis

-eases. That we prayed for colonization. Blood.

Microbes escaping test tubes conquering

lab countertops slower than hearsay, she say

we burned Daddy's corpse like bad Muslims,

like White (coated) doctors instructed. What else

is contagious: doctored death certificates. Half

-truths. Cursive. Ink. They say there is no cure

then there is a cure only for them. So. What

else spreads: knots of grief twisting bowels

into distended loops of fermenting torment. No

days of mourning. Two years of outside

intervention. Armies. Conviction. Belief that

this will spread & spread. That all contagions

wax endemic. This one will never end.


SOURCE: If God Is A Virus: Poems by Seema Yasmin, published by Haymarket Books, Illinois, USA, 2021, p. 2.