R320. Remembering the World: The Memoir of Political Witness

Portland Ballroom 256, Oregon Convention Center, Level 2
Thursday, March 28, 2019
4:30 pm to 5:45 pm

 

“Be a Columbus to continents within you,” says Thoreau. But what about memoirists preoccupied by more literal land masses? Writers interested in national, rather than individual, conflicts; by the foolishness and wisdom of societies. In this panel, five experienced nonfiction writers talk about how the lens of personal recollection and the formal flexibility of memoir itself can be deployed to accomplish what Carolyn Forché calls a “poetic witness to dark times.”


Participants

Moderator:

Glen Retief's The Jack Bank: A Memoir of a South African Childhood won a Lambda Literary Award. He teaches creative nonfiction at Susquehanna University, where he also directs the undergraduate creative writing major.

Carolyn Forché’s books of poetry include Blue Hour; The Angel of History, which received the Los Angeles Times Book Award; and The Country Between Us. She is also the editor of Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness and the coeditor of Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English 1500-2001. Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is the Director of the Lannan Center for Poetry and Poetics and holds the Lannan Chair in Poetry at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

Aminatta Forna is the author of four novels Happiness, The Hired Man, The Memory of Love, and Ancestor Stones, as well as a memoir The Devil that Danced on the Water. Aminatta is currently Lannan Visiting Chair of Poetics at Georgetown University and Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.

Nick Flynn is a poet, playwright, and memoirist. His most recent book is Stay, a collection of collaborations and writings. I Will Destroy You, a collection of poems, is forthcoming. His work has been translated into fifteen languages.

Hasanthika Sirisena's stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, Epoch, StoryQuarterly, Narrative, and other magazines. She is a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers' Award and the 2015 Juniper Prize for Fiction. Her short story collection The Other One was released in March 2016.

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