Maria Smilios is an adjunct lecturer at Columbia University School of Public Health and award-winning author of The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis (G.P. Putnam’s Sons).
Smilios recently came to Mission Hall for a writing seminar with IGHS students. Steven Birenbaum, Senior Manager of Communications & Partnerships at IGHS, and Smilios sat down to talk about her approach to teaching writing. Her new book, Deluge: Hurricane Helene and the Making of a Catastrophe (St. Martin’s Press), comes out in September 2027.
The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Q: You teach a writing course to public health grad students. What’s your assessment of how students write these days?
A: That’s a loaded question! There are two factors that play into this: One, the high school they went to. The second: their undergraduate major. If they went to a good high school – and they majored in anything in the humanities – they have a good instinct of writing. I should add a third one: reading. The kind of reading and how often they read. However, it falls between a high and low. My husband teaches at a university and his students struggle.
Q: With graduate students is the bar a bit higher?
A: I think it falls between like, you know, a B+ average. And I’m talking about B+ with 1500 to 2000-word pieces. What I’m seeing is actually very good. And I think it’s also because this is an elective. They want to be able to do this. In my course I give them the opportunity to write a piece from third person or first person. Some of the best ones are from students who have written about their experience. One wrote about her brother, who has cerebral palsy and was eventually put in a home. She wrote from her perspective and was able to talk about her feelings and her brother.
Q: What do you think are some key writing skills today’s students need?
A: You have to be able to write succinctly. And there has to be information. Students struggle with grammar. Forty percent of Americans did not read a single book last year and something like 56 percent are reading at a sixth-grade level. This is from the National Literacy Center. One of the more challenging things for me is to design assignments that are for success. I don’t want gotcha moments – it doesn’t serve anybody.
Q: Is there room for “voice” in more traditional professional writing?
A: Well, I always say to students, try to write as if you are [sic:] saying, “Come here. I want to tell you a secret.” I want you to feel like you’re the only person in the room.
Q: That’s the voice?
A: Yes. It’s intimate. I’m going to tell you this story in a way that you can understand it, because I’m going to assume you don’t know that much about it. I’m not going to tell it to you in a way that’s going to make you feel bad. Remember when like you were a kid and you’d sit in the back seat. You can’t do this now because of seatbelts, but you kind of want to look over like the driver’s shoulder. I don’t even drive! But I think of taking people on a journey with me in the driver’s seat. I’m driving down a road, and I want them to know that we’re not going to go veer off the road.
Q: In the seminar you gave at IGHS I attended, you mentioned a student who basically used AI and made up everything in his piece. How are students using AI in their work?
A: Well, Columbia University has very strict schoolwide policies. As an instructor, either you lean into it and they can use it and don’t have to disclose it, or they use it and they have to disclose it. Or you don’t allow them to use it at all. But I am not going to fool myself that they’re not using it, so when you use it, you have to disclose it.
Q: Like an honor code?
A: Yes. I don’t have the time to fact check all of what they’re putting down there. So if something sounds particularly egregious to me, I’m like mmmm. They also have to run it through a program before turning it in, but it will flag things where first person is used. And I’m like, “what are you flagging here?”
Q: AI is really hard.
A: I hate to say this because it makes you sound old, you know where they’re like, well, every parent dealt with a teenager, and I’m like, “No, this is really unprecedented.” We are dealing with machines that can think so fast. The ethical dimensions of AI are vast…the climate dimensions and the fact that the schools are not teaching responsible use. In China and in Denmark, they’re learning to use it from kindergarten.
Q: In your seminar you stressed the importance of finding one person’s story to tell. Why is that important?
A: It’s easier for people in today’s world to focus on one person. Of course, in the one person, there’s going to be other people involved, right? If you just decide to focus on the young boy who’s like, dying of liver cancer. Write that story. Obviously, there’s parents or caregivers involved. The story will involve them too. But to focus just on him, as a way to say we need more funding for pediatric liver cancer, will allow people to stay with him for the duration of the story.
Q: I watched a commencement speech you gave in 2024 in which you emphasized the need for humanity. How can we stay resolute about the need for humanity, when it’s under attack?
A: I’m glad you asked that question. I do believe at the core, most people are fundamentally good. I think when you’re living in a moment like this in the last 10 years, where it’s fight or flight, where every day we wake up to the completely unexpected. It’s a new punishment for certain groups of people. And then for the rest of us it’s hard to feel and believe that human beings still have a capacity. When I decided I wanted to write a second book I wanted to write a book that was going to put me in a space that – and this sounds really hokey – that centered on human kindness.
Q: You consciously thought that?
A: I consciously thought that. My new book, which comes out in 2027, came from my personal experience with Hurricane Helene, which hit western North Carolina where I live. I was standing on a distribution line in late October (two weeks before the 2024 Presidential election). There were all these U-Haul trucks unloading supplies. I said, “I want to leave it for people that need it.” And the woman supervising said, “We have so much. The American people want you to have this.” It struck me at that moment, why does it take a disaster to be nice to each other?
Q: Why do you think it is?
A: Because when we had a complete blackout where there was no cell phones, nothing happening, we were completely isolated. There was no Internet. All people had to do was help each other.
Q: We got out of “Lord of the Flies” for seven days…
A: Yup. The moment the Internet came back on people were able to engage and became “keyboard warriors” again. They fell back into their personal beliefs. I started to think about the idea – that even for this brief moment — what we were taught amid this complete catastrophe, which claimed so many people’s lives…what emerged is the triumphant moment that we still have the capacity to be good to each other, and it shouldn’t take these disasters to do so.
Banner photo by Parker Pfister