Skid Road: On the Frontier of Health and Homelessness in an American City

Written by Josephine Ensign

Narrated by Holly Adams

In Skid Road, Josephine Ensign digs through layers of Seattle history-past its leaders and prominent citizens, respectable or not-to reveal the stories of overlooked and long-silenced people who live on the margins of society.

The sometimes fragmentary tales of these people, their lives and deaths, are not included in official histories of a place. How, Ensign asks, has a large, socially progressive city like Seattle responded to the health needs of people marginalized by poverty, mental illness, addiction, racial/ethnic/sexual identities, and homelessness? Drawing on interviews and extensive research, Ensign shares a diversity of voices within contemporary health care and public policy debates.

Informed by her own lived experience of homelessness, as well as over three decades of work as a family nurse practitioner providing primary health care to homeless people, Ensign is uniquely situated to explore the tensions between caregiving and oppression, as well as charity and solidarity, that polarize perspectives on homelessness throughout the country. A timely story in light of the ongoing health care reform debate, the affordable housing crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic, the stories from Skid Road illuminate issues surrounding poverty and homelessness throughout America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Aug 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781666159745

Josephine Ensign

Josephine Ensign is an associate professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, where she teaches community health, health policy, and narrative medicine. A graduate of Oberlin College, the Medical College of Virginia, and Johns Hopkins University, she has been a nurse for over thirty years, providing health care for homeless and marginalized populations. She is an alumna of Hedgebrook and the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. Her essays have appeared in The Sun, The Oberlin Alumni Magazine, Pulse, Silk Road, The Intima, The Examined Life Journal, Johns Hopkins Public Health Magazine, and the nonfiction anthology I Wasn’t Strong Like This When I Started Out: True Stories of Becoming a Nurse, edited by Lee Gutkind. Catching Homelessness is her first book. She lives in Seattle.