Anna Leahy

With more than 40% of people eventually facing a cancer diagnosis, Conversing with Cancer is a much-needed addition to understanding and improving cancer care through strong communication among providers, patients, and caregivers. Each person whose life is affected by a cancer diagnosis—patient, healthcare provider, caregiver—has information and needs information in order to make the best decisions possible under the circumstances. After studying and writing about the topics of communication and cancer for many years separately, authors Lisa Sparks and Anna Leahy combine their expertise in this new tour de force. Here, they apply principles from the field of health communication to the cancer care experience, drawing from a wide range of scholarship to offer a comprehensive view of cancer care communication and extend existing work into new insights. Engaging chapters cover all phases of the journey through cancer, from prevention to recovery or end-of-life; analyze the roles of the variety of cultural and social identities and relationships; and explore written, verbal, non-verbal, and electronic communication. In addition, this book draws from the real-life stories of cancer patients themselves to enrich the book’s unique discussions and to better understand how theory can be put into practice. Conversing with Cancer is ideal for use in health communication classes, medical and nursing programs, and formal caregiver training. In addition, it is useful for cancer patient and caregiver supports groups and for individual providers, patients, and caregivers.

With more than 40% of people eventually facing a cancer diagnosis, Conversing with Cancer is a much-needed addition to understanding and improving cancer care through strong communication among providers, patients, and caregivers. Each person whose life is affected by a cancer diagnosis—patient, healthcare provider, caregiver—has information and needs information in order to make the best decisions possible under the circumstances. After studying and writing about the topics of communication and cancer for many years separately, authors Lisa Sparks and Anna Leahy combine their expertise in this new tour de force. Here, they apply principles from the field of health communication to the cancer care experience, drawing from a wide range of scholarship to offer a comprehensive view of cancer care communication and extend existing work into new insights. Engaging chapters cover all phases of the journey through cancer, from prevention to recovery or end-of-life; analyze the roles of the variety of cultural and social identities and relationships; and explore written, verbal, non-verbal, and electronic communication. In addition, this book draws from the real-life stories of cancer patients themselves to enrich the book’s unique discussions and to better understand how theory can be put into practice. Conversing with Cancer is ideal for use in health communication classes, medical and nursing programs, and formal caregiver training. In addition, it is useful for cancer patient and caregiver supports groups and for individual providers, patients, and caregivers.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. One in two men and one in three women will develop invasive cancer. Tumors have the power to redefine identities and change how people live with one another. Tumor takes readers on an intellectual adventure around the attitudes that shape how humans do scientific research, treat cancer, and talk about disease, treatment, and death. With poetic verve and acuity, Anna Leahy explores why and how tumors happen, how we think and talk about them, and how we try to rid ourselves of them. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

(Literary Nonfiction / Space / Science) For poet Anna Leahy and scientist Douglas R. Dechow, quintessential children of the Space Age, love for each other and love of space are inseparable. The moon landings, the shuttle program, the prospect of manned travel to Mars: each stop in humanity's journey to space has marked a step in their ongoing love affair with each other and the cosmos. Told by Anna and Doug in alternating chapters, part memoir and part homage to the unquenchable spirit of exploration, GENERATION SPACE is a charming, captivating celebration of the serendipitous power of a shared passion.

"Anna Leahy's generous poetic imagination encompasses women from Marie Curie to Esther Williams to Elizabeth Siddal, poet Felicia Hemans to the mothers of the characters in The Wizard of Oz, a lighthouse keeper and a plethora of saints. Leahy quotes Barthes: "in order to look at [history], we must be excluded from it." It is through the rare courage of distance, both aesthetic and psychological, that the lovely, compelling poems of Aperture afford us their unique glimpse of an all-too-often-ignored female universe of inner and outer significance." - Annie Finch"Anna Leahy's collection of poems, Aperture, is simultaneously focused in its subject matter about women and capacious in scope, not an easy feat. The book is an aperture or an opening into essential lives that may have been forgotten. There are persona poems and third-person lyric poems that investigate women-from the mothers in The Wizard of Oz, to artists and poets, to saints, to mathematicians, to astronomers, and much more-creating a chorus of unique, yet unified female voices. Leahy writes poems with such intelligence, concision, grace, and precision in terms of the line, language, and the word. Aperture is an arresting and necessary addition to the landscape of contemporary poetry." -Victoria Chang