Carolyn Forché

Carolyn Forché is the author of five books of poetry, most recently In the Lateness of the World (Penguin Press, 2020). Other works include Blue Hour (2004), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Angel of History (1995), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award, The Country Between Us (1982), winner of the Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and Gathering the Tribes (1976), winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize. Her book What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance (Penguin Press, 2019) won the Juan E. Mendez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her anthology Against Forgetting was praised by Nelson Mandela as “itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice.” She was one of the first poets to receive the Windham Campbell Prize from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and in 1998 in Stockholm she received the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Prize. She has translated the poetry of Claribel Alegría, Robert Desnos, and Mahmoud Darwish. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and Lannan Foundation. She is professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and lives in Maryland with her husband, photographer Harry Mattison.

Photo Credit: Don J. Usner