Education Commons^™

Contemporary Memoir: A 21st-Century Genre Ideal For Teens, Dawn Latta Kirby, Dan Kirby

Faculty and Research Publications

A brief narrative description of the journal article, document, or resource. For the past 20 years, the authors have been reading and teaching literary memoir to students of all ages. In the mid-1980s, they began looking for ways to incorporate more nonfiction into their literature classes, hoping to find a fresh genre unflattened by instruction. They wanted to explore with students a genre that literary critics had not already overanalyzed and for which they had not created formulaic heuristics for student analysis. More than anything else, the authors wanted to find literary works that connected directly with students' lived experiences. …