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Releasing the Porcelain Birds
Poetry. Women's Studies. In 1989 the five members of the Bugan family were allowed to leave Ceausescu's Romania with one suitcase each and death-threats in their wake. In 2010 the poet Carmen Bugan took possession of 1,500 pages of Securitate files on her father and in 2013 a further 3,000 pages of secret files on her mother, sister, brother and herself. RELEASING THE PORCELAIN BIRDS is about the transformation of that extraordinary history of Cold War Europe into poetry; it is about writing the self free and how poetry drawn in a new and tender narrative can do this. In this manner RELEASING THE PORCELAIN BIRDS is one continuous poem which faces down dispossession and reaches towards exuberance.
90 pages, Paperback
Published April 19, 2016
About the author
Carmen Bugan
11 books19 followersDr. Carmen Bugan, a George Orwell Prize Fellow, is a prize-winning writer based in Long Island, NY. She was born in Romania and has lived in England, Ireland, and France. Educated at the University of Michigan and Balliol College, Oxford University, UK, with a PhD in English Literature, she is the author of four collections of poems (the most recent one a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation), an internationally acclaimed memoir, and a highly praised critical study. Her work has been translated into several languages and appears in publications such as PEN Atlas, Modern Poetry in Translation, the TLS, Harvard Review, PN Review, and others. Her book of essays, Poetry and the Language of Oppression, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
She was a fellow at the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers (Scotland), a Creative Arts Arts Fellow in Literature at Wolfson College, Oxford University (UK), has received a major individual grant from the Arts Council England, and has taught creative writing and literature in the US, UK, and Switzerland.
Bugan appears at book fairs and festivals such as the London Book Fair, the Cork Literary Festival, The Goteborg Book Fair, and Le Livre sur les Quais (Morges, Switzerland) and lectures widely at universities in Europe and the United States. She is a member of the Geneva Writers Group and of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers. In 2014 she has presented a long form documentary for the BBC World News and the World Service called ‘The Man Who Went Looking for Freedom’ on the story of her family, which is the subject of much of her writing.
She teaches memoir, creative writing, and provides book doctoring and private tutorials at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop in New York City. Carmen Bugan was the 2018 Helen DeRoy Professor in Honors at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she lectured on Poetry and the Language of Oppression; she was also the 2018 Dow Visiting Scholar at Saginaw Valley State University, where she gave a keynote lecture on poetry in a time of politics. She chairs a monthly poetry reading series called Literary Excursions, at the Setauket Neighborhood House in East Setauket, NY, a platform she has founded in 2016 to support the local poets.
She was a fellow at the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers (Scotland), a Creative Arts Arts Fellow in Literature at Wolfson College, Oxford University (UK), has received a major individual grant from the Arts Council England, and has taught creative writing and literature in the US, UK, and Switzerland.
Bugan appears at book fairs and festivals such as the London Book Fair, the Cork Literary Festival, The Goteborg Book Fair, and Le Livre sur les Quais (Morges, Switzerland) and lectures widely at universities in Europe and the United States. She is a member of the Geneva Writers Group and of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers. In 2014 she has presented a long form documentary for the BBC World News and the World Service called ‘The Man Who Went Looking for Freedom’ on the story of her family, which is the subject of much of her writing.
She teaches memoir, creative writing, and provides book doctoring and private tutorials at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop in New York City. Carmen Bugan was the 2018 Helen DeRoy Professor in Honors at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she lectured on Poetry and the Language of Oppression; she was also the 2018 Dow Visiting Scholar at Saginaw Valley State University, where she gave a keynote lecture on poetry in a time of politics. She chairs a monthly poetry reading series called Literary Excursions, at the Setauket Neighborhood House in East Setauket, NY, a platform she has founded in 2016 to support the local poets.
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