Memory & Complicity, Finishing Line Press, 2018

Storyteller and poet Eve Hoffman, a sixth generation Georgian, is rooted in red clay and grew up on a dairy farm by the Chattahoochee River. Along the way she graduated from Smith College, studied in Africa, lived in San Francisco, worked at Stanford and then settled back to the land she loves to raise a family. Her lineage includes a Revolutionary War soldier, a mill owner “hung near to death” by Yankees, a suffragette leader and a grandfather who helped shape the south as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Eve has held public office, impacted education and environmental policy, founded a statewide K-12 writing competition and backed her car onto a fire hydrant after swim practice, about which her kids still tease her. She has been recognized by her alma mater, Smith College, as a “Remarkable Woman” and by Georgia Trend as one of Georgia 100 influential people.

Memory & Complicity is available at Amazon.com, MercerUniversityPress.com or contact evehoffmanassistant@gmail.com

THE YELLOW DRESS

…the first time I wore the yellow dress/

was for my installation as president

of The Temple Youth Group …./ Five hours

after the Youth Group party ended/…

the synagogue of The Hebrew Benevolent

Congregation/ was bombed–/a gaping

hole blasted in the north side of the building/

where just hours before we’d been dancing/

to Elvis Presley, Perry Como, and the Kingston Trio.

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THE CHURCH (from Memory & Complicity)

…the church where he came to for refuge

AIDS tracing his body, racing through lymph glands

as he walked into the church of abolitionists

with a sore on his back that wouldn’t heal…

and the minister counseled him

You are gay. I cannot help you… This is God’s revenge.

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PRAISE FOR MEMORY & COMPLICITY

Eve Hoffman’s book of memories arrives at a conflicted time in American life and culture, and provides much needed insight into the paths that led us here and possibilities for going forward. Her voice provides a rare window into complicated issues of identity, community, social evil and moral possibilities. I hope that you will peer into this unsettling mirror, invited by her lyrical gifts, and begin the process of reflection, dialogue and action to repair a broken world.

Robert M Franklin, PhD, President Emeritus, Morehouse College

Eve Hoffman is a born storyteller and sixth generation Southerner with deep roots in north Georgia’s red clay. Her poetry is a story of time and of family that called her home after sojourns in Massachusetts, Africa and California—but she, and it, had also changed. Here are stories of becoming, inseparable from those rays of self-awareness that mark the stages of personal life interwoven with historical currents. And here is a vision of a South still aborning, like herself. Her poetry brings us home to where the heart lives. In the end, her work stands as a testimonial to a love that lives both in the ordinariness and in the trials, losses, struggles of our lives—if we but look.

Jamil Zainaldin, President Emeritus, Georgia Humanities Council