Lives Lived: A Reading

Carolyn Forché is an American poet, editor, translator, and activist. Her books of poetry are Blue Hour, The Angel of History, The Country Between Us, and Gathering the Tribes. In 2013, Forché received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship given for distinguished poetic achievement. In 2017, she became one of the first two poets to receive the Windham-Campbell Prize. She is a University Professor at Georgetown University. Margaret Atwood calls Forché’s newest book, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance (Penguin Press), “Astonishing, powerful, so important at this time.” Carolyn Forché is twenty-seven when the mysterious stranger appears on her doorstep. The relative of a friend, he is a charming polymath with a mind as seemingly disordered as it is brilliant. She's heard rumors from her friend about who he might be: a lone wolf, a communist, a CIA operative, a sharpshooter, a revolutionary, a small coffee farmer, but according to her, no one seemed to know for certain. He has driven from El Salvador to invite Forché to visit and learn about his country. Captivated for reasons she doesn't fully understand, she accepts and becomes enmeshed in something beyond her comprehension. What You Have Heard is True is a devastating, lyrical, and visionary memoir about a young woman's brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others.

Dani Shapiro is the bestselling author of the memoirs Hourglass, Still Writing, Devotion, and Slow Motion and five novels. In Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love (Penguin Random House), she confronts a staggering family secret uncovered by a genealogy test: her father was not her biological father. She woke up one morning and her entire history--the life she had lived--crumbled beneath her. Inheritance is a book about the extraordinary time in which we live, a time in which science and technology have outpaced not only medical ethics but also the capacities of the human heart to contend with the consequences of what we discover. Ruth Franklin, in The New York Times Book Review, found Inheritance "Profound... The true drama of Inheritance is not Shapiro’s discovery of her father’s identity but the meaning she makes of it [...]Shapiro’s account is beautifully written and deeply moving — it brought me to tears more than once."

Emily Bernard received her PhD in American studies from Yale University. She has been the recipient of grants from the Ford Foundation, the NEH, and a W. E. B. Du Bois Resident Fellowship at Harvard University. Her essays have been published in The American Scholar, Best American Essays, and Best African American Essays. She is the Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English at the University of Vermont. Her latest book, Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother's Time, My Mother's Time, and Mine (Knopf) is an extraordinary, exquisitely written memoir (of sorts) that looks at race--in a fearless, penetrating, honest, true way--in twelve telltale, connected, deeply personal essays that explore, up-close, the complexities and paradoxes, the haunting memories and ambushing realities of growing up black in the South with a family name inherited from a white man, of getting a PhD from Yale, of marrying a white man from the North, of adopting two babies from Ethiopia, of teaching at a white college and living in America's New England today. Henry Louis Gates calls it, "A major contribution." Washington Post says it’s, “magnificent.”