Carmen Bugan

Teaches at Gotham Writers' Workshop

Carmen Bugan is the author of the memoir Burying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police (MacMillan/Picador and Graywolf Press), which was a finalist for the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and also was serialized for the radio by the BBC. She is also the author of the poetry collections Releasing the Porcelain Birds (Shearsman Books), The House of Straw (Shearsman Books), and Crossing the Carpathians (Carcanet Press). Her poems and essays have appeared in the Irish Times, the Harvard Review, the International Literature Quarterly, the Nieman Storyboard at Harvard University, and in the anthologies Centres of Catacylsm (Bloodaxe Books), See How I Land: Oxford Poets and Exiled Writers (Heaven Tree Press), and Penguin’s Poems for Life (Penguin Hardback Classics), among many others. Her work has been translated into Italian and published as On the Side of Forgetting/Sulla Soglia Dellla Dimenticanza (Edizione Kolibris). She narrated the documentary The Man Who Went Looking for Freedom for the BBC. She received an individual grant from the Arts Council of England, and was named a George Orwell Prize Fellow for Political Writing. She has taught at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, the Geneva Writers’ Group, and Oxford University. She holds a BA from the University of Michigan, an MA in Creative Writing from Lancaster University, and a Master’s and Ph.D, both in English Literature, from Oxford University.