Amy C. Sullivan is a writer and U.S. history professor whose areas of expertise include the history of medicine, childhood, gender, drugs, addiction, and trauma. Her narrative, oral history-based and digital projects highlight histories rooted in social change, community, and healing.
Amy teaches modern U.S. history at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota and has worked on projects for Johns Hopkins University’s Berman Institute of Bioethics, The Bakken Museum, and the National Library of Medicine, among others.
Amy was raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma and now lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota with her family. An art school dropout, she balances these heavy history topics by also working with colors, textiles, threads, paint, and garden dirt.
““Now more than ever, increasing access to medicine and embracing harm reduction’s humanitarian philosophy of “meeting people where they are at” seems not only imperative but certainly among the most positive changes our country could make to lower addiction and death rates.”
From Opioid Reckoning, p. 211
2022 Finalist,
Emilie Buchwald Award for
Minnesota Nonfiction
Praise for Opioid Reckoning:
“Dr. Sullivan’s work on behalf of addition and treatment is remarkable and Opioid Reckoning offers a glimpse into the faces of the epidemic.
With heart and soul and considerable scholarship, Sullivan has written a book that offers hope and help for any affected by addition.”
- Superior Reads
"In this timely book, Dr. Amy C. Sullivan illuminates how the public health crisis of opioid use disorder cannot be adequately conveyed through abstract statistics. The personal narratives and oral histories Sullivan weave together tell an indelible story of the trauma, stigma, and, above all, humanity of the experience of addiction and recovery."
- Sarah Gollust,
University of MN School of Public Health
"From the Land of 10,000 Rehabs comes this generous and heartening testament to the power of empathy and the wisdom of harm reduction. Living with Amy Sullivan’s stories of ‘trauma parenting,’ we are compelled to take stock of how our own lives and losses intertwine with those who people these pages.”
- Nancy D. Campbell
author, OD: Naloxone, The Politics of Overdose