Radical Histories, Radical Bodies: Marissa Spear on Narrative Practice at the Intersection of Disability and History

Marissa Spear brings a tapestry of experiences to narrative practice—she’s a writer with a disability, a historian, YA author, program evaluator, and former dancer from Northwest Arkansas. Her journey has been shaped by personal illness, political inquiry, academic research, a deep embodied commitment to health justice, cultural storytelling, and the radical possibilities of narrative.

“I grew up curious about health and specifically how it impacted history,” says Marissa, who works as a program evaluator at the Center for Community Engaged Evaluation at University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences’ Institute for Community Health Innovation. In her current role, she helps assess and improve community health programs addressing a wide range of topics including food insecurity and maternal and child health.

Even as a child, Marissa cherry picked books from the shelves of her mother, a nurse.

“I distinctly remember carrying Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic around for an entire summer, disregarding the sheer impracticality of carrying around a book of that size,” says Marissa. (The hardcover book  has 656 pages.)

“Written by a gay man living with HIV, And the Band Played On was one of the first comprehensive investigative works into the government’s indifference towards the disease.

Tracing Threads of Justice Through Storytelling

Fast-forward to today; Marissa applies that early fascination with illness narratives and its critical engagement with the history of medical justice to both her vocation and avocation.

Whether she’s training researchers on ethical qualitative research methods, leading evaluations with community partners, or deconstructing the politics of childhood memory through critical essays, Marissa’s work consistently centers disabled voices and advocates for more inclusive storytelling.

“I believe disabled and chronically ill people are the experts of their own bodies and histories,” she says. “We deserve to be in the archives, on the page, and at the table.”

Driven By Personal Struggle with Disease

Marissa’s experience with chronic illness—particularly endometriosis—became the catalyst and the lens through which she interrogates the relationship between body, history, and power. Long before she had the language to name her condition, she searched for connection by reading books that gave voice to the lived experience of illness and marginalization.

As an undergraduate studying health equity and public health at Goucher College in Maryland, Marissa centered her thesis on the Baltimore branch of the Black Panther Party which awakened her disability consciousness. The Black Panther Party’s health politics challenged medical racism and reimagined community care as a tool for liberation. Leaders like Norma (Armour) Mtume, who ran clinics in Los Angeles and Berkeley before becoming the Party’s national finance minister, embodied this ethos with clarity and courage. Mtume’s words—“Know your body. Know thyself”—became an anchor for Spear, illuminating a path not just to scholarly engagement but to self-actualization and disability consciousness.

Her essay on disability in children’s historical literature appears in the 2025 anthology An American Girl Anthology: Finding Ourselves in the Pleasant Company Universe by the University Press of Mississippi. Her  historical research—focuses on health and disability in social movement history and the gendered dynamics of the Black Panther Party and the Civil Rights and Black Power era—has appeared in Hopkin’s Press Journal of Women’s History, Contingent Magazine, and Nursing Clio.

Storytelling Gives Voice to the Marginalized

Through this work, Marissa came to see storytelling as a transformative force: one that bridges the personal and the political, reclaims agency for marginalized bodies, and imagines more-just models of care.

When Marissa entered Columbia University's Narrative Medicine certification program, she brought with her a rare and dynamic convergence of personal and political insight.

“Through the CPA program, I started writing about my own experience with illness and started to make sense of it,” says Marissa “I really began to see the power of giving voice to illness narratives.”

Author, Author

“I really began to see the power of giving voice to illness narratives.”
– Marissa Spear

In addition to her academic writing, Marissa is also an author of young adult fiction.  

Loosely based on her own experiences with chronic illness and disability, her fiction calls out the erasure of disabled histories and offers new, inclusive ways of reading the past. Marissa was a 2021 Rogue Mentee with Marissa Eller, author of Joined at the Joints. Her YA fiction work was longlisted for The Voyage Journal’s 2021 Book-Pitch Contest and was a 2024 finalist for LitUp by Reese's Book Club.

Real and Radical

Marissa’s eclectic background—ranging from performance to political theory, personal illness narratives to revolutionary history—uniquely positions her to practice a form of narrative medicine that is as rigorous as it is radical. Her work affirms that stories are not just a method of understanding illness; they are a means of reimagining who gets to heal, who gets to be heard, and what kind of world we might build when we center the voices most often dismissed.

“I’ve always been a jack of all trades, so even though it seems all over the board, my Black Panther work, the YA fiction, growing up as a dancer – all are about knowing our bodies and  giving voice to illness stories,” says Marissa. “In the end, we are all patients or are going to be. We need to tell our stories.”

These days she is pursuing her Master of Library and Information Studies from the University of Oklahoma.

Narrative Mindworks Questionnaire

1. What is your idea of perfect happiness? 

   I'm hoping my greatest achievement is still ahead of me. However, when I left my undergraduate studies, I always thought I needed to "wait" to get a certain degree or to be in a graduate program to write and conduct the research I wanted to. It turns out I was wrong. I'm proud of myself for persevering. You can read some of my work here: https://www.marissaspear.com/ 

2. Who is your favorite writer?

   A. I read across so many genres that it is hard to narrow down, but I'd have to say my favorite writer of all time is Hanif Abdurraqib. He's a poet, cultural critic, and essayist that writes about everything from basketball to music to Palestine (when I say even his Instagram stories are moving, I really mean that). He's an accessible writer, and reading his work has made me a better person and writer. In terms of young adult writers, again, I have so many to name, but Riss M. Neilson and Marissa Eller are my must-buy authors. If you’re looking for fantastic middle grade, Anna Lapera and Clare Edge. 

3. Who are you most grateful for?

    I’m most thankful for my family and friends. I feel lucky to have such a strong support system and a community of disabled and chronically ill friends both near and far that keep me grounded and help take care of each other.