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"Skid Road: On the Frontier of Health and Homelessness in an American City" by Josephine Ensign is a narrative history, set in Seattle, which explores the intersection of safety net health care and homelessness. "Skid Road" deepens our understanding of the historical roots of poverty and homelessness, trauma and resilience, and the role of charity and safety net health care and public policy in King County. Informed by her own lived experience of homelessness, and many years providing primary health care to homeless people, Ensign will discuss this complicated issue. 

Josephine Ensign is a professor of nursing at the University of Washington (UW) School of Nursing in Seattle, Washington where she teaches health policy, public health, and health humanities. She is an adjunct professor, UW School of Arts and Sciences, Department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies. Her scholarship focuses on health and social inequities for people marginalized by poverty and homelessness. Her essays have appeared in The Sun, Front Porch Journal, Pulse, Silk Road, The Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, Electric Literature, The Examined Life Journal, Oberlin Alumni Magazine, and the Johns Hopkins Public Health Magazine.