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’s Memory & Complicity ©Mercer University Press hits bookshelves on May 1, 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. Hoffman’s previous books include Red Clay, Celebration of Healing and SHE. www.evehoffmanpoet.com
Memory & Complicity available at Amazon.com, Mercer University Press.com, Barnes & Noble.com or memoryandcomplicity@gmail.com
COMMENTS AND BLURBS ABOUT MEMORY & COMPLICITY
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
Eve Hoffman confronts our moral sensibilities. Being a white, Jewish girl (and then woman) of privilege in the South over the last half century was fraught with contradictions and challenge. Eve reveals not being taught of the 1906 Atlanta race riot, or of her great-grandmother’s involvement in the Georgia Women’s Suffrage movement. She recalls black field hands not being invited to sit at a common table, and of learning the startling truth that lynchings were not the furtive acts of rednecks but public displays of racial power where tickets were sometimes sold. She shares the experience of living on a farm where cows were shot and hung by their legs to be butchered. In her honest, unembellished way, Eve’s unsettling glimpses of her own past are a moral challenge to our own willful ignorances and the difficult truths of our own life history.
~ Paul Root Wolpe, Director, Emory University Center for Ethics
Eve Hoffman -- Poetry and Writing 