GRCC Honor Graduate and famed poet and essayist Carmen Bugan, who won the 2011 Bakeless Prize for Burying the Typewriter and who leads off Song of the Owashtanong: Grand Rapids Poetry in the 21st Century, joins her family as they return to Romania in the BBC World News Special, The Man Who Went Looking for Freedom. The show airs in the Grand Rapids area on the BBCWNH channel on 3/29, at 4:10 a.m., 3:10 p.m., and at 9:10 p.m.
Carmen’s father was a famous dissident who defied the Ceaucescu regime and spent years in prison; they all were spied upon and harassed by the Securitate during those years, eventually seeking asylum in the US Embassy. Carmen began her life in freedom at GRCC and went on to win honors at the University of Michigan, Poets’ House/Lancaster University, and Oxford University. Her academic study, Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile, and her second book of poetry, House of Straw, were both published recently. Now, years later, Carmen and her family return to the homeland and home they had once known, to neighbors and others who once had spied upon them, and go through massive Securitate files now opened to them after decades. Their homecoming is a journey of both sorrow and forgiveness, and a deeper grasp of the many ways in which their own government invaded their lives.
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