About this item
A captivating memoir of one woman's long journey to late transition, as the trans community emerges alongside her."A universal and profound meditation on the price of authenticity." -- Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of She's Not There and Good BoyLong before Laverne Cox appeared on the cover of Time, far removed from drag and ballroom culture, there were countless trans women living and dying as men, most of whom didn't even know they were trans. Diana Goetsch's This Body I Wore chronicles one woman's long journey to coming out, a path that runs parallel to the emergence of the trans community over the past several decades. "How can you spend your life face-to-face with an essential truth about yourself and still not see it?" This is a question often asked of trans people, and a question that Goetsch, an award-winning poet and essayist, addresses with the power and complexity of lived reality.
About the Author
Previously wrote under the name Diana Goetsch is an American poet, author of eight collections, including In America (a 2017 Rattle Chapbook Prize selection) , Nameless Boy (2015, Orchises Press) and The Job of Being Everybody, which won the 2004 Cleveland State University Poetry Center Open Competition. Her poems have appeared in leading magazines and anthologies including The New Yorker, Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review and Best American Poetry. She is also a nonfiction writer and columnist, author of essays on subjects ranging from baseball history to medical ethics to political messaging. From 2015-16 she wrote the "Life in Transition" blog at The American Scholar, where she chronicled her gender transition, along with issues faced by America's newest visible minority. Her honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Donald Murray Prize for writing pedagogy, and a Pushcart Prize. For 21 years she was a New York City public school teacher, at Stuyvesant High School, where she taught gifted and mostly immigrant children, and at Passages Academy in the Bronx, where she ran a creative writing program for incarcerated teens.
