Making the Invisible Visible: Travon Williams on Health, Justice, and the Power of Storytelling

Tristan Cabello

For Travon Williams, the Master of Liberal Arts program at Johns Hopkins was about finding language—language for pain, for survival, for justice, and for hope.

“I came to the MLA program seeking more than credentials,” Travon reflects. “I needed a framework to unpack systemic issues that have affected my life and my community.” As a survivor of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, he had firsthand experience with the assumptions often made about Black bodies in medical institutions—about pain, drug-seeking, and supposed resilience. The MLA gave him a way to make sense of it, and more importantly, a way to speak back.

Today, Travon’s research weaves together structural racism, mental health, and cultural expression. His essays explore everything from medical neglect to Michael Jackson’s Thriller—revealing how public narratives encode ideas about surveillance, race, and masculinity. In his words, “I research for the survivors—of illness, of injustice, of systems that weren’t built for them.”

Finding a Framework That Honors Lived Experience

For students like Travon, the MLA is more than just flexible or interdisciplinary—it’s also liberatory.

“This program welcomed all the parts of me: the patient, the thinker, the artist, the survivor,” he says. “It helped me turn my story into a method, my pain into a tool. And that’s exactly what I needed.”

Through his coursework, Travon discovered the critical frameworks to match his lived experience. “Race and Ethnicity in the U.S. gave me the vocabulary to articulate structural violence,” he says. “The Black Politics of Michael Jackson changed how I see power and culture. And Religion and Politics in the Founding Era reshaped how I understand what it even means to be American.”

For prospective students wondering whether their personal story belongs in the classroom, Travon is clear: “Your story is your strength.”

Studying with Purpose, Healing with Intention

Graduate school isn’t easy. But for Travon, it came with particular challenges—chemo brain and long-term side effects made memory and focus harder. Revisiting trauma through academic work was painful. But it was also healing.

“The MLA made space for all of that,” he says. “I’ve learned to be transparent with my professors. I’ve discovered new ways of learning. And I’ve been able to turn my deepest questions into rigorous scholarship.”

From the MLA to Public Health Leadership

Travon isn’t stopping here. His next step is applying to the Master of Health Science in Mental Health at Johns Hopkins, where he hopes to build a career advocating for culturally responsive mental health care.

His long-term goal is bold and community-centered: a mobile mental health initiative for underserved urban neighborhoods, offering on-demand therapy, wellness education, and social services. “This work is urgent,” he says. “And the MLA has given me the intellectual foundation to do it right.”

Advice for New Students: Show Up As You Are

Travon encourages future MLA students to bring their full selves into the classroom. “Your background isn’t a liability—it’s a source of power. Don’t try to separate your life from your research. The program is strongest when you’re fully present.”

He also shares the thinkers who guide his journey: W.E.B. Du Bois, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Cornel West, bell hooks, Judith Butler, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, whose work on intersectionality he calls “foundational.”

Travon Williams’s story is exactly what the MLA is built to honor. This is a program for those who want to ask urgent questions—and who understand that the best scholarship begins with lived experience.

📬 Follow Travon on Instagram at @tpatrickwilliams