Chris Forhan is the author of the memoir MY FATHER BEFORE ME, as well as poetry collections FORGIVE US OUR HAPPINESS, winner of the Bakeless Prize; THE ACTUAL MOON, THE ACTUAL STARS, winner of the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize; and BLACK LEAPT IN, chosen by poet Phillis Levin for the Barrow Street Press Book Prize. He was raised in Seattle, and earned an MA from the University of New Hampshire and an MFA from the University of Virginia. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and two Pushcart prizes. His poetry has been anthologized in THE BEST AMERICAN POETRY 2008 and has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, New England Review, Parnassus and other magazines. He teaches at Butler University in Indianapolis, where he lives with his wife and two children.

Books by Chris Forhan

My Father Before Me: A Memoir

by Chris Forhan - Memoir, Nonfiction

The fifth of eight children, Chris Forhan was born into a family of silence. He and his siblings learned, without being told, that certain thoughts and feelings were not to be shared. On the evenings his father didn’t come home, the rest of the family would eat dinner without him, his whereabouts unknown. And on a cold night in 1973, just before Christmas, Forhan’s father killed himself in the carport. Forty years later, Forhan digs into his family’s past and finds within each generation the same abandonment, loss and silence in which he was raised. He shows his family members as both a part and a product of their time.