Dr. Carmen Bugan, a George Orwell Prize Fellow, is a prize-winning poet and writer based near Ann Arbor, Michigan. She teaches memoir, creative writing, and provides book doctoring and private tutorials at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop in New York City. She is also on the faculty of the Oxford Writing Mentors, the Poetry School in London, and the International Women Writing Guild, and she is a member of Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW).
Bugan was a Visiting Assistant Professor at New York University in Abu Dhabi, and an Adjunct Professor at Stony Brook University, where she taught literature. Carmen Bugan was the 2018 Helen DeRoy Professor in Honors at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she lectured on Poetry and the Language of Oppression; she was also the 2018 Dow Visiting Scholar at Saginaw Valley State University, where she gave a keynote lecture on poetry in a time of politics. She chaired a monthly poetry reading series called Literary Excursions, at the Setauket Neighborhood House in East Setauket, NY, a platform she has founded in 2016 to support local poets.
Born in Romania, Bugan lived in England, Ireland, and France. Educated at the University of Michigan and Balliol College, Oxford University, UK, with a PhD in English Literature, she is the author of six collections of poems (one a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation), an internationally acclaimed memoir, which won the Bread Loaf Nonfiction Prize, and two highly praised critical studies. Her work was translated into several languages with books in Swedish, Polish, and Italian. She also published in PEN Atlas, Modern Poetry in Translation, the TLS, Harvard Review, PN Review, and others. Her book of essays, Poetry and the Language of Oppression (Oxford University Press) was named an “essential book for writers” by Poets and Writers.
She was a Fellow at the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers (Scotland), a Creative Arts Arts Fellow in Literature at Wolfson College, Oxford University (UK), has received a major individual grant from the Arts Council England, and has taught creative writing and literature in the US, UK, and Switzerland.
Bugan appears at book fairs and festivals such as the London Book Fair, the Cork Literary Festival, The Goteborg Book Fair, and Le Livre sur les Quais (Morges, Switzerland) and lectures widely at universities in Europe and the United States. In 2014 she has presented a long form documentary for the BBC World News and the World Service called The Man Who Went Looking for Freedom on the story of her family, which is the subject of much of her writing.
Please see Carmen’s profiles from the POETRY FOUNDATION and POETS AND WRITERS
Listen /Watch Carmen (and others) talk about her work
New Course for the Poetry School in London, Spring 2026
Carmen Bugan has several interviews at the Ann Arbor Public Library, which can be read here:
The City and the Writer with Carmen Bugan
Poetry School London, July 2024, “Tender Towards Innocence” poetry workshop
Poetry School London, poetry workshop “A Quest for Innocence in a Troubled World”
The Translator and the Impossible, New York University Abu Dhabi
Trinity College Dublin, June 2023: Poetry, Translation, Resistance
https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/bioethics/events/#2023
Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, England, poetry reading with Gregory Pardlo and Joshua Weiner, November 2019
Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, England, Poetry of Witness: Dictatorship, Ecology, Terrorism. Will Harris talks to Carmen Bugan, Sean Hewitt & Richard Osmond about alternative ways of writing on difficult subjects, November 2019
Nassau Community College, Long Island, NY, April 20, 2020 via ZOOM
Living Writers, WCBN, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Cold War Conversations Podcast, on Burying the Typewriter
On MONOCLE radio–THE FOREIGN DESK talking about life behind the Iron Curtain
ON ABC talking about the Cold War in a series of programs on Why the Cold War Still Matters
World of ideas–Reading with AE Stallings at Boston University, October 2019
University of Michigan Residential College Podcast: Carmen Bugan and the Language of Freedom
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnJ-gXKdBGY
This is a short selection of poems, articles and interviews around the web. Other links to media interviews, reviews, and work, appear under the specific books which generated interest:
Why literature must be part of the language of recovery from crisis
Lyricism as activism: Sigurd Olson and The Singing Wilderness
Dr. Carmen Bugan--Poet, Scholar, Teacher 