What Sula Teaches Us About Public Health: A Toni Morrison Reading and Conversation

For National Public Health Week (NPHW), A Mercy in the Telling is hosting a guided reading conversation on Sula by Toni Morrison.

Many of us in public health spend our time reading studies, policy briefs, and evaluations. Those are important tools. But they are not the only places where knowledge about health, community, and survival lives. Literature often reveals what institutions struggle to see.

Set in a Black community in Ohio, the novel offers a powerful lens on race, gender, belonging, and the social conditions that shape health and survival. In Sula, Morrison writes about friendship, community norms, belonging, stigma, gender expectations, grief, and the ways communities care for—and sometimes fail—one another. None of these themes are labeled “public health.” But if you work in this field, you will recognize them immediately.

The novel offers a way of seeing how communities organize themselves around harm, care, morality, and survival. It shows how reputations form, how isolation takes hold, how people are marked as outsiders, and how communities respond to difference. These are deeply public health questions.

Over the first two weeks of April, we’ll read Sula together and then gather for a conversation at the end of NPHW to reflect on what the novel reveals about community life and the social conditions that shape health.

This is not a traditional book club. Think of it as a public health reading of a novel many of us admire and love—an unexpected lens through which to see our work.

Together we’ll explore questions like:
• What forms of belonging protect people—and what forms quietly isolate them?
• Where does care appear in the novel, and where does it collapse under the weight of social expectations?
• What does Morrison reveal about the fragile line between protection, punishment, and neglect?

If you work in public health, policy, community organizing, or simply love literature that tells the truth about how people live together, you’re welcome to join!

Reading window: Sunday, March 28 – Saturday, April 11
Discussion gathering: Saturday, April 11 (time TBD)

You’ll receive:
• A short reading syllabus to guide the two-week reading window
• A one-page reading companion with themes to notice and discussion questions
• An opportunity to discuss Sula together using a public health lens in community

The novel is short and very readable, so the two-week window should be manageable. All you need is a copy of Sula by Toni Morrison!
If you’d like to participate, leave a comment below so I can share additional details with you directly.

I can’t wait to read with you!