November Narrative Medicine Rounds with Dr. Shanda McManus
“Brother Epistles: A Sister’s Memoir,” a conversation with Dr. Shanda McManus moderated by Dr. Nicole Brittingham Furlonge
For our November Rounds, we are honored to welcome Dr. Shanda McManus, an author and family medicine physician with over twenty years in practice. She received her B.A. in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania and her M.D. from Thomas Jefferson Medical College. She is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine at Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine, where she champions the practice of Narrative Medicine. Shanda writes about the intersection of life, race, and medicine. Her work has appeared in several journals, including Bellevue Literary Review and Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine. She was privileged to be a 2021 PEN America Emerging Voices fellow. Her debut title, Brother Epistles: a sister’s memoir, is a memoir in letters that probes grief, gun violence, societal forces, and sibling bonds.
In Brother Epistles, a series of intimate letters, Dr. McManus writes as both sister and physician to her late brother Monir, who was killed in a drive-by shooting on a Philadelphia street in 1992. Three decades later, still haunted by his murder, McManus traces her brother’s life through their upbringing in North Philadelphia, Monir’s teen fatherhood and stint in the U.S. Army to support his young sons, and finally, his participation in the drug trade.
Dr. McManus blends social commentary, memory, and collective history to lament the fragility of Monir’s life while demanding an American reckoning for the socioeconomic structures responsible for so many young Black men dying through homicide. A heartbreaking conversation between a sister and her brother, leavened with humor, family love, and unconquerable Black joy, Brother Epistles is a powerful meditation on Black identity, the criminalization of Black boys, and the devastating ripple effects of a tragic loss on the loved ones left behind.
Event Moderator Dr. Nicole Brittingham Furlonge is an interdisciplinary scholar of listening who translates that expertise into institutional leadership. Her book Race Sounds: The Art of Listening in African American Literature(University of Iowa Press, 2018) laid the theoretical groundwork she now applies to how leaders attune to systems, cultures, organizations, and people. Co-founder of LEARNS Collaborative and creator/host of The Listening Salon podcast, Dr. Furlonge consults with education, nonprofit, and for-profit organizations on strategic planning, systems alignment, professional learning networks, team culture, and listening practices. For several years, she taught a listening seminar in the Narrative Medicine program. A first-generation college student, Dr. Furlonge earned her Ph.D. and B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and her M.A. from the University of Michigan. She is currently working on a book on Civic Listening and another on Adoption and American Identity.
