Words and Music for Democracy 

Dr. Michael Fine, author and doctor, and Joe Mulholland, noted jazz pianist and composer, and faculty member at Berklee, perform Dr. Fine's short story called “God's Providence” while Joe weaves music in and around it.

Michael Fine, MD is an award-winning author, community organizer, public health expert/leader, and family physician. Dr. Fine is the author of On Medicine As Colonialism (PM Press, 2023), which explores the way medicine and health care have been used by health care profiteers to co-opt the state’s regulatory power, Medicare, and Medicaid and extract resources from communities and upend democracy in the U.S.; Health Care Revolt, an expose, manifesto and playbook that exposes the failures of the healthcare market to deliver health and plans a movement to build the healthcare system the US needs (PM Press, 2018); Abundance, a novel about two young Americans caught up in the Liberian civil wars of 1998-2003 (PM Press, April 2019);  The Bull and Other Stories (Stillwater River Press, 2020) ; and Rhode Island Stories (Stillwater River Press, 2021).  He is the coauthor, with James W. Peters, of The Nature of Health (Radcliffe, 2007), a study of healthcare services, human rights, society, technology, and industry; and The Zero Calorie Diet (Red House Press, 2010), a look at the culture of excess through the lens of fasting.  The Bull and Other Stories was the 2021 IPNE Literary Fiction Book of the Year.

Dr. Fine serves as Chief Health Strategist for the City of Central Falls Rhode Island.  Dr. Fine served in the Cabinet of Governor Lincoln Chafee as Director of the Rhode Island Department of Health 2011-2015, overseeing a broad range of public health programs and services, 450 public health professionals and managing a budget of $110 million a year. Fine’s short stories have been published monthly on RINewsToday.com since 2018 and reach an audience of 15,000-20,000 people every month.