Associate Professor of English Lauren Smith and her college composition students have created the Michigan Pandemic Story website.
“Students from Delta College in the Great Lakes Bay region of Michigan have gathered information from residents about their experiences with COVID-19. Their task has been to interview Michiganders from all walks of life to tell their pandemic stories online. They are endeavoring to create a living history of this region during this unprecedented time. All the stories told here are with the permission of the participants.”
In a recent interview with Humanities Center Director and Professor of History Amy French, Lauren shared that this “Pandemic Storybook” is similar to the Pandemic Influenza Storybook the CDC created to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the flu pandemic of 1918, helping students to understand both the unique nature of this experience as well as its connections to history.
In the interview, Lauren explains: “The project became for us to create a hyper-local version of the CDC pandemic storybook for Covid-19. My goal as instructor was to try to always, first of all, help my students become better writers and thinkers, but also then to offer a service to our community in a way that we could. That meant for us collecting oral history that related to Covid in this moment.”
Visitors to MyPandemicStory can click on county names to see the stories gathered from residents there or select their reading by the name of the person interviewed and their county.
Delta College Faculty Association 