Memory, Witness, and the Poetics of Language:
A Virtual Conversation with Acclaimed Author Carmen Bugan
A Special Late Spring Writers Studio Session
Thursday, July 2, at 17.00 CET (Geneva)
The Geneva Writers Studio is delighted to welcome one of our own to close out this season's Late Spring Studio series. GWG member and award-winning poet and memoirist Carmen Bugan will join the community for an intimate conversation on Thursday, July 2, at 17.00 CET (Geneva time), exploring memory, language, survival, and the ways writing can become both testimony and liberation.
Carmen's critically acclaimed memoir, Burying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police, traces her childhood in Romania, where her father's dissent against the Ceaușescu regime brought the family under surveillance before their emigration to the US in 1989. The memoir was called "a modern classic" by the Sunday Times and "an exemplary memoir" by the TLS, and has been the recipient of numerous other distinctions. As the Irish Times wrote of her work: “Bugan, a published poet, can with a single sentence paint a portrait of almost visceral immediacy . . . If Bugan's memoir is transformative, her poetry is downright alchemical, transmuting the deprivations of her family's life experiences into dreamy gold.”
Carmen is also the author of several poetry collections including Tristia, Time Being, Lilies from America: new and selected poems, and the author of Poetry and the Language of Oppression from Oxford University Press. Across all of her work, Carmen returns to the same urgent questions: what it means to bear witness under oppression, how language adapts and endures, and how poetry—written in exile, in a second tongue, against silence—can become its own form of freedom. It is precisely these questions that will animate our conversation.
What to expect
This special session will follow the spirit of our Studio sessions while opening into a shared conversation with Carmen's work and practice. The session will include:
· short readings from Carmen's work
· an open conversation and Q&A with Carmen
· generative writing prompts provided by Carmen
· time for optional sharing and collective reflection
This session is offered as a free, community-wide event, and we warmly invite both current participants and the broader GWG community to join us.
Where: Online via Zoom
Date: Thursday, March 26, 2026
Time: 17:00-19:00 Geneva time
Free for GWG members and friends of our community.
Carmen Bugan holds a doctorate in English Literature from Balliol College, Oxford University, and has taught at Oxford, NYU Abu Dhabi, University of Fribourg, Stony Brook University, University of Michigan, the Geneva Writers Group; she now teaches at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop in NYC as well as the Poetry School in London, and the Oxford Writing Mentors. She won the Bread Loaf Conference Bakeless Prize for Nonfiction for Burying the Typewriter, which was also a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing. In 2017, she was named a George Orwell Prize Fellow. Her essays and poems appear in the TLS, Harvard Review, PN Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, and elsewhere.
