During her presentation, “Discovering Baghdad: How Writing My Father’s Story Took Me to the Tigris,” Lauren Camp will read from her poetry and give an inside look at the process of writing One Hundred Hungers.
Poet Lauren Camp, author of One Hundred Hungers, will speak at 7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 1, in Cole Hall at Bridgewater College. The event is free and open to the public.
During the presentation, “Discovering Baghdad: How Writing My Father’s Story Took Me to the Tigris,” Camp will read from her poetry and give an inside look at the process of writing One Hundred Hungers.
“Since my father did not want to – or could not – recall old memories, parts of One Hundred Hungers are an informed invention of his childhood,” Camp said. She will talk briefly about the research effort and the frustration of writing without a personal sense of Baghdad in the 1940s. “Through words, I drew situations and conversations that allowed me to explore the dislocation that defined my father’s life and led to my existence as an Arab-American girl in an old-world family,” she said.
In addition to One Hundred Hungers, which won the Dorset Prize and was named a finalist for the Arab American Book Award, Camp is the author of The Dailiness and This Business of Wisdom. Her newest book is Turquoise Door: Finding Mabel Dodge Luhan in New Mexico, and Took House will be released in 2019.
Camp lives in New Mexico, where she teaches through the state’s Poetry Out Loud program, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s Art and Leadership Program and at Santa Fe Community College. A veteran public radio producer, Camp hosts “Audio Saucepan,” a global music program interwoven with contemporary poetry, on Santa Fe Public Radio.
