Thirteen Ways of Looking at Henrietta Lacks

Wallace Stevens’s 1917 poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” suggests that what we see is never simply what is there. This essay presents 13 ways of looking at Henrietta Lacks (1920–1951), whose cultured cells were used to create the HeLa cell line, and whose story was told in a 2011 book by Rebecca Skloot.