Karen Branan and Susan Tichy—a reading and conversation, presented by the DC chapter of Coming to the Table.
Distant cousins, unknown to each other, Karen Branan and Susan Tichy each spent twenty years researching their families’ legacy of racism and violence. In 2014, they met through the DC chapter of Coming to the Table, a nonprofit organization that provides resources and a supportive environment for all who wish to acknowledge and heal the wounds from racism rooted in the U.S. history of slavery.
From Karen Branan: a journalist’s memoir: The Family Tree: a lynching in Georgia, a legacy of secrets, and my search for the truth. (Simon & Schuster, 2016).
Harris County, Georgia, 1912. A white man, the beloved nephew of the county sheriff, is shot dead on the porch of a black woman. Days later, the sheriff sanctions the lynching of a woman and three men, all African American and all of them innocent. In The Family Tree, Karen Branan, the great-granddaughter of the sheriff, digs deep into the past to deliver a shattering historical memoir a century after that horrific day. As she unravels this painful story, Branan is also forced to confront her own deep-rooted beliefs surrounding race and family, ultimately challenging her own self-image as an educated, modern woman who had risen above the racism of her upbringing—a transformative process which comes to a head when Branan uncovers a startling truth: she is not only related to the sheriff, but also to one of the four murdered African Americans. Both identities – culprit and victim – are her inheritance to bear. Read reviews & more at http://www.karenbranan.com/
"If you think Faulkner made it up, enlighten yourself by reading Karen Branan’s nonfiction account of a lynching in the family. What makes this 'past is not past' lesson so moving and admirable is the exacting reportorial clarity with which Branan approaches the confusion of race, sex, murder and myth in her southern bloodlines. A model of truth-seeking." - Diane McWhorter, Pulitzer-Prize Winning author of Carry Me Home
From Susan Tichy: a poet’s montage: Trafficke (Ahsahta Press, 2015)Obsessively interrogating three hundred years of family history in Scotland and Maryland, Trafficke tracks and remixes questions of race and identity, fact and legend into a mosaic of verse, lyric prose, historical narrative, and quotation. Twenty years in the making, Trafficke began with legends of origin, of persecution and survival, that cast their glamour—in the old Scottish sense of a spell, an illusion—over the poet’s ancestor, Alexander Magruder, obscuring the vicious reality of the family’s two hundred years of slave-owning in America. A Highland Scot transported to Maryland in 1652 as a prisoner of war, by the time of his death Magruder owned four indentured servants, twelve hundred acres of what had been Patuxent and Piscataway land, and one African man. As Trafficke strips away the glamour, it takes shape not as a simple uncovering of truth, but as a dis-spelling, a building and tearing down of identity’s various disguises, of power’s relentless self-justification, of the poet’s bitterness and complicity. Stepping forward and backward in time, sampling texts that range from 16th c. Gaelic poetry to runaway slave advertisements, the narrative pulls readers through a many-layered critique of ownership and the timeless seductions of beauty. Violence and language, literacy and desire—these too are characters in the lyrical, fraught, and grief-charged text of Trafficke. Read more at http://susantichy.com/
‘If ignorance is innocence / all is true all is false.’ Thus Trafficke plows under the surface of our collective amnesia and unearths a family past—beginning in Reformation Scotland, ending in slavery’s abolition in Maryland—that is our American past. History and myth, treachery and self-preservation, prose and verse collide and change places, caught in the dialectic eddies and splinters of Tichy’s luminous formal invention. This is a work of piercing lyric intelligence and fearless heart. Trafficke changes all the rules.—Peter Streckfus, author of The Cuckoo (Yale Younger Poets Series) and Errings.
Karen Branan is a veteran journalist who has written for newspapers, magazines, stage, and television for almost fifty years. Her work has appeared in Life, Mother Jones, Ms., Ladies’ Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, Today’s Health, Learning, Parents, Star Tribune (Minneapolis), The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and on PBS, CBS, ABC, CBC, BBC, and CNN.
Susan Tichy is the author of four previous poetry collections, including Gallowglass (2010) and Bone Pagoda (2007). Her poems and mixed-genres works have been widely published in the US and Britain, and recognized by awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers, the Chad Walsh Prize from Beloit Poetry Journal, the Pushcart Prize anthologies,and many others. She teaches in the MFA and BFA programs at George Mason University.
