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Carolyn Forché: Writing a Memoir

@ Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts

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Human rights advocate, Professor of English and Chair of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University, Carolyn Forché has received many prizes and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Lannan Literary Fellowship and The Academy of American Poets Fellowship.

Carolyn will be reading from, and talking about, her memoir: ‘My memoir, tentatively titled What You Have Heard Is True, is not about myself, but about the woman I once was, who did not know then what was ahead, nor that she would survive. I have torn up several versions of this work over the past decade, but now feel certain I am coming to the end. Oddly, I knew how the story ended when I began, but was not aware of how much I would necessarily have to leave out, nor where it would begin if it were not to begin when I was born. I tell people this: the memoir is not about myself, but about other people. It does not provide history but writes from within it.’ TriQuarterly

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