Author Talk: Diana Goetsch at the Davenport Public Library Eastern Avenue Branch -- July 26.
Wednesday, July 26, 6 p.m.
Davenport Public Library Eastern Avenue Branch, 6000 Eastern Avenue, Davenport IA
Reading from and discussing her acclaimed 2022 memoir as part of a multi-state tour to support libraries and minorities being targeted by book bans, poet and essaying Diana Goetsch delivers an artist talk at the Davenport Public Library's Eastern Avenue Branch on July 26, her lauded The Body I Wore described by the New York Times Book Review as an "achingly beautiful" work written "with such clarity it bowls one over."
The author of eight collections of poems, the Life in Transition blog at The American Scholar, and last year's memoir This Body I Wore, Goetsch's writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Best American Poetry, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. Her honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the New School, where she served as the Grace Paley Teaching Fellow. For 21 years, Goetsch was a New York City public school teacher at Stuyvesant High School and at Passages Academy in the Bronx, where she ran a creative writing program for incarcerated teens. A sought-after presenter as well as a renowned author and teacher, Goetsch's ongoing "Actually Writing" class has attracted a worldwide following, and she has been featured on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, The New York Times Book Review Podcast, and at numerous conferences panels.
With This Body I Wore, Goetsch chronicles the budding trans communities of the late 20th century, and the light it sheds on today’s struggle for trans equality. Following the publication of Goetsch's The Job of Being Everybody in 2004, Nameless Boy in 2015, and In America in 2017, the release of 2022's This Body I Wore landed its author her most glowing reviews to date. Kirkus Reviews called the book “a valuable memoir enriched by years of personal and societal insight.” Lit Hub, listing the work as among the “Most Anticipated Books of 2022,” deemed it “an important and beautiful memoir.” And Thomas Peele, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of Killing the Messenger, said of This Body I Wore, “The writing is spacious, beautiful, precise, and poignant. The reader floats through the sentences, entranced. Magnificent is not an overstatement.”
With her local reading and talk followed by a Q & A discussion, Diana Geotsch's presentation at the Eastern Avenue Branch takes place on July 26, participation in the live event is free, and more information is available by calling (563)326-7832 and visiting DavenportLibrary.com.
