MY FATHER BEFORE ME

By Chris Forhan
Scribner, June 28, 2016

Marrying the literary scope of memoirists Geoffrey Wolff and J.R. Moehringer with the intensity of family novels like The Corrections and We Are Not OurselvesMy Father Before Me is the kind of epic, immersive memoir that comes along once in a decade.

An award-winning poet offers a multi-generational portrait of an American family—weaving together the lives of his ancestors, his parents, and his own coming of age in the 60s and 70s in the wake of his father’s suicide, in this superbly written, “fiercely honest” (Nick Flynn) memoir.

 

About the Author

 

Chris Forhan is the author of the poetry collections Forgive Us Our Happiness, winner of the Bakeless Prize; The Actual Moon, The Actual Stars, winner of the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize; and Black Leapt In, chosen by poet Phillis Levin for the Barrow Street Press Book Prize. He was raised in Seattle and earned an MA from the University of New Hampshire and an MFA from the University of Virginia. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and two Pushcart prizes. His poetry has been anthologized inThe Best American Poetry 2008 and has appeared in PoetryPloughsharesNew England ReviewParnassus, and other magazines. He teaches at Butler University in Indianapolis, where he lives with his wife and two children.

 

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