Literary Disparities

Literary Disparities is a conversation-based podcast that explores the connection between women’s health and artistic and cultural production. It features interviews and conversations with authors and artists as well as health justice advocates, medical professionals, and researchers whose work addresses the cultural invisibility of women’s health struggles and asks the question—can artistic expression help to make the invisible visible?

Women’s health research remains chronically underfunded, making conditions like PMOS (formerly called PCOS), endometriosis, and bacterial vaginosis unnecessarily obtuse and difficult to diagnose. As a result, many suffer in silence. Literary Disparities has a mission: to help shed light on creators whose work influences our ideas and experiences of women’s health.

Season one features interviews with prominent artists and researchers including Lydia Yuknavitch, Deesha Philyaw, Dr. Melanie Jeske, who are shaping the landscape of women’s health. Get notified when new episodes are released by becoming a subscriber! Find Literary Disparities on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Literary Disparities is produced and hosted by Cameron Dezen Hammon, lecturer in Medical Humanities, and co-produced and edited by Rice University student Muna Nnamani, with support from the Medical Humanities Research Institute and Scholarly and Creative Works Subvention Fund.

About Us

Cameron Dezen Hammon is author of This Is My Body: A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession (Lookout Books), recipient of the Nonfiction Discovery Prize Winner for the 2019 Writers’ League of Texas Book Award, a bronze medalist for the Independent Publisher Book Award in Creative Nonfiction, and a finalist for the Foreword INDIE Book of the Year in Autobiography and Memoir. Her nonfiction writing investigates the intersection of spirituality and the body, and she is the host and co-producer of “Literary Disparities: A Podcast about Women’s Health in Art and Culture”. Her work has appeared in The Sun, Prairie Schooner, The Kiss anthology (W.W. Norton), Vogue, Ecotone, the Literary Review, the Houston Chronicle, NYLON, and elsewhere. She is a lecturer in Medical Humanities at Rice University.

Muna Nnamani (2027) is a Medical Humanities Student Ambassador, majoring in both in English and Religion on the pre-law track. Muna's coursework and professional goals reflect the interdisciplinary nature key to the medical humanities. As an aspiring lawyer and healthcare policymaker, she nurtured a passion for biomedical research through her neuroscience research on anti-seizure medications at Baylor College of Medicine and volunteer work in the Ben Taub Hospital Trauma-Surgical ICU. Muna is currently drafting senior theses for her two majors, including a legal analysis of the Re Estate of Brooks (III. 1965) case that examines the Jehovah's Witness group's aversion to blood transfusions through the lens of religious psychology, and a psychoanalytical reading of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. She also fosters global health knowledge on campus as the Team Leader of the VAW Global Medical chapter, the largest and oldest widely available medical internship abroad at Rice.