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Cancer, the ‘emperor of all maladies,’ is a leading cause of death worldwide. Cancer is, seemingly, everywhere: it brings to mind screening programs, pinkwashed fundraisers, promises of a cure, and myriad memoirs and fictions, lending cancer an abundance of meaning in our contemporary world. With developments in genetic testing and early detection, many aspects of contemporary cancer care have transformed—and with them, questions around risk and responsibility. In the clinic, cancer outcomes are increasingly understood in terms of individualized risk. Yet, these developments and ways of understanding cancer are limited to urban centers of the world, largely in the U.S. and Europe, with access to costly medical technologies. Further, experiences and outcomes of cancer care, from surveillance to treatment, refract along lines of race, gender, and geography, and the disease is a frame through which the politics of healthcare can be starkly seen and traced. In this upper-level undergraduate seminar, students are invited to explore cancer care—inequalities, experiences, and poetics—through literary and ethnographic analysis.