Diana Goetsch is an American poet and essayist. Her poems have appeared widely, including in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, The Best American Poetry, and the Pushcart Prize anthology, among others. She also wrote the “Life in Transition” blog at The American Scholar. For 21 years, Goetsch was a New York City public school teacher at Stuyvesant High School and Passages Academy in the Bronx, where she ran a creative writing program for incarcerated teens. This Body I Wore: A Memoir (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) chronicles her long journey to coming out, a path that runs parallel to the emergence of the trans community over the past several decades. “How can you spend your life face-to-face with an essential fact about yourself and still not see it?” is a question often asked of trans people, and Goetsch addresses it with the power and complexity of lived reality. She brings us into her childhood, her time as a beloved teacher, and her plunge into the city’s cross-dressing subculture in the 1980s and ‘90s. This Body I Wore is not a transition memoir, but rather a full account of trans life, one at once unusually public and closeted.