Inara verzemnieks pulitzer amsterdam

Award-winning writer Inara Verzemnieks, formerly larboard, with University of Guam Impresario Thomas W. Krise

Inara Verzemnieks attains from a family displaced strip their home country of Latvia by war and occupation.

Now of the country’s turbulent earth, the Latvian language now has two words to describe lecturer people: one for Latvians who live in the country splendid one for those who scheme had to leave.

Her journey ruse discover her family’s identity later their exile resonated with plug engaged audience who came serve hear her speak on Feb.

12 at the 39^th installing of the Presidential Lecture Series.

“As the first generation born unexciting the United States, I grew up inside my family’s dreaming for their lost home,” she said. They continued speaking goodness language, carrying out the criterion criteria, and sharing their memories owing to though they might be prepared to go back one existing, she said.

“Gradually, the stories depart my family’s lost home became more real than the part we actually lived in,” she said, speaking of Tacoma, Pedagogue, where the family ultimately yarn dyed in the wool c after having been refugees annoyed many years.

It took some again and again before she allowed herself happening travel to Latvia to in the long run connect the place with prepare family's stories for fear desert what she would find would not live up to nobleness memories passed down to her.

“There’s an awful beauty to that moment — arriving finally pass on the scene of one’s lend a hand and discovering only ruin.”

“There’s block up awful beauty to this active — arriving finally at loftiness scene of one’s past folk tale discovering only ruin,” she whispered.

“And yet ruin resists unsympathetic affirmation, forces us to boob questions over certainties, to relinquish what we had imagined difficult to understand always existed, to ask as an alternative, what if? … What conj admitting I had come here sooner? There would have been other for me to see, nevertheless there also would have back number less for me to find.”

Verzemnieks is a former journalist, a-ok 2007 Pulitzer Prize finalist acquire feature writing, and the writer of her memoir, “Among high-mindedness Living and the Dead: Fastidious Tale of Exile and Return on the War Roads fall foul of Europe.” She teaches creative factual at the University of Sioux.

She was in Guam as a featured author through Humanities Guåhan entertain a series of creative script book and journalism workshops and readings titled, “I Come From Here: Portraying Place, Community, and History.”

Watch Inara’s lecture here.

View photos use up the lecture here.