Naa Asheley Ashitey

Naa Asheley Ashitey is a Chicago-born writer and MD–PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. A first-generation, low-income Ghanaian-American and University of Chicago alumna, she writes at the intersection of race, medicine, and belonging.

 Her creative and editorial writing examines how policy, media, and academia reproduce structural violence—and what it means to resist with truth.

 Her creative work appears or is forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Hobart, The San Antonio Review, BULL and editorials for The Xylom, MedPage Today and KevinMD. She has been nominated for multiple awards, including Best Small Fiction and a finalist for the Claire Keyes Poetry Award. More at NaaAshitey.com.

Twitter/Instagram: @foreverasheley
Bluesky: @foreverasheley.bsky.social

Easy read of the poem in the image above:

Survival of the fittest

The soil is parched but
the stems have been
splitting at the roots.
Among the rapture lies
A branch that made its way out
from under,
flexing
itself in an
acute angle to
greet the sun,
even when she is napping behind the clouds.
The ends have degraded and
f R aY ed.
They have been further
desecrated by man’s tools and are bound to be
ignored by the soles and pillars of concrete jungles,

And

/ splintered /

across b-r-o-k-e-n
pavements.

Still,

it crawls across the land.
The water from above threads new passages,
Ensuring that the patches of green along the roots
can be nourished and given a chance of being made whole once more.