Carolyn Forché | |
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 Forché announcing the 2010National Book Critics Circle Award finalists in poetry | |
| Born | (1950-04-28)April 28, 1950 (age 75) Detroit,Michigan, U.S. |
| Occupation |
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| Education | Michigan State University (BA) Bowling Green State University (MFA) |
| Notable works | Gathering the Tribes (1976);The Country Between Us (1981);What You Have Heard Is True (2019) |
| Notable awards | Windham–Campbell Prize |
| Spouse | |
Carolyn Forché (born April 28, 1950) is an American poet, editor, professor, translator, andhuman rights advocate.[1] She has received many awards for her literary work.
Forché was born inDetroit,Michigan, to Michael Joseph and Louise Nada Blackford Sidlosky. Forché earned a bachelor's degree in Creative Writing atMichigan State University in 1972, andMaster of Fine Arts atBowling Green State University in 1975.[2]
She has taught at a number of universities, including Bowling Green State University,[3] Michigan State University, theUniversity of Virginia,Skidmore College,Columbia University,San Diego State University and in the Master of Fine Arts program atGeorge Mason University.
Forché is a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University,[4] and has received honorary doctorates from theUniversity of Scranton,[5] theCalifornia Institute of the Arts,Marquette University,[6] Russell Sage University, and Sierra Nevada College.[7] She was Director of Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice, and held the Lannan Visiting Chair in Poetry atGeorgetown University, Washington, DC, where she is now a University Professor.[8] She is co-chair, withGloria Steinem, of the Creative Advisory Council ofHedgebrook, a residency for women writers onWhidbey Island.[9]
Forché lives inMaryland with her husband,Harry Mattison, a photographer, whom she married in 1984. Their son is Sean-Christophe Mattison.
Forché's first poetry collection,Gathering the Tribes (1976), won theYale Series of Younger Poets Competition, leading to publication by Yale University Press.[10] After her 1977 trip to Spain, in which she translated the work of Salvadoran-exiled poetClaribel Alegría as well as the works ofGeorg Trakl andMahmoud Darwish, she received aGuggenheim Fellowship, which enabled her to travel toEl Salvador, where she worked as a human rights advocate, mentored byLeonel Gómez Vides.
Her second book,The Country Between Us (1981), published with the help ofMargaret Atwood, received thePoetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and was also theLamont Poetry Selection of theAcademy of American Poets. Forché has held three fellowships from theNational Endowment for the Arts, and in 1992 received aLannan Foundation Literary Fellowship.[11] Additional awards include theRobert Creeley Award,[12] theWindham–Campbell Prize, the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation Award for Peace and Culture, and the Denise Levertov Award.[8]
Her anthology,Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, was published in 1993, and her third book of poetry,The Angel of History (1994), was chosen for theLos Angeles Times Book Award. Her works include the famed poemThe Colonel (The Country Between Us). She is also a trustee for theGriffin Poetry Prize.[13] Her articles and reviews have appeared inThe New York Times,The Washington Post,The Nation,[14]Esquire,Mother Jones,Boston Review,[15] and others.
Her fourth book of poems,Blue Hour, was released in 2003. Other books include a memoir,The Horse on Our Balcony (2010, HarperCollins); a book of essays (2011, HarperCollins); a memoir about her time in El Salvador,What You Have Heard Is True (2019, Penguin Press); and a fifth collection of poems,In the Lateness of the World (Bloodaxe Books, 2020).
In October 2019,What You Have Heard is True was named a finalist for theNational Book Award for Nonfiction.,[16] the book also won the 2019 Juan E. Méndez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America.
In 2024, she was elected as aRoyal Society of Literature International Writer.[17]
Among her translations areMahmoud Darwish'sUnfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems (2003),Claribel Alegría'sSorrow (1999), andRobert Desnos'sSelected Poetry (with William Kulik, for the Modern English Poetry Series, 1991).[8]
Forché has given poetry readings in France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Russia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Lithuania, Belarus, Finland, Sweden, Republic of South Africa, Zimbabwe, Libya, Japan, Colombia, Mexico and Canada. Her poetry books have been translated into Swedish, German and Spanish. Individual poems have been translated into more than twenty other languages.
Although Forché is sometimes described as a political poet, she considers herself a poet who is politically engaged. After the publication of her second book,The Country Between Us, which included poems describing what she had personally experienced in El Salvador at the beginning of theSalvadoran Civil War, she responded to controversy concerning whether or not her work had become “political,” by researching and writing about poetry written in the aftermath of extremity in the 20th century. She proposed that such works not be read as narrowly “political” but rather as “poetry of witness." Her own aesthetic is more one of rendered experienced and at times of mysticism rather than one of ideology or agitprop.
Forché is particularly interested in the effect of political trauma on the poet's use of language. The anthologyAgainst Forgetting was intended to collect the work of poets who had endured the impress of extremity during the 20th century, whether through their engagements or force of circumstance. These experiences included warfare, military occupation, imprisonment, torture, forced exile, censorship, and house arrest. The anthology, composed of the work of one hundred and forty-five poets writing in English and translated from over thirty languages, begins with the Armenian Genocide and ends with the uprising of the pro-Democracy movement at Tiananmen Square. Although she was not guided in her selections by the political or ideological persuasions of the poets, Forché believes the sharing of painful experience to be radicalizing, returning the poet to an emphasis on community rather than the individual ego. In this she was influenced byTerrence des Pres,Hannah Arendt,Martin Buber,Simone Weil andEmmanuel Levinas.[18]
Forché is also influenced by herSlovak family background, particularly the life story of her grandmother, an immigrant whose family included a woman resistance fighter imprisoned during the Nazi occupation of former Czechoslovakia. Forché was raisedRoman Catholic and religious themes are frequent in her work.
Forché appeared in theKen Burns Oscar-nominated documentaryThe Statue of Liberty in 1985.[19]
In November 2013, Forché was interviewed as both scholar and poet for the documentaryPoetry of Witness, directed by independent filmmakers Billy Tooma and Anthony Cirilo.
In 2022, the albumThe Blue Hour was released, based on lyrics from the poemOn Earth from the collectionBlue Hour: Poems. The song cycle was commissioned by the Boston chamber orchestraA Far Cry and the music was composed by five female composers:Rachel Grimes,Angélica Negrón,Shara Nova,Caroline Shaw andSarah Kirkland Snider.[20]
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